What the evidence does not settle

Every record on this site ends with what it does not yet know: a date the sources leave loose, a document catalogued but not yet read, a name that cannot be tied to a person. This page gathers all of them, 247 across 8 kinds of record, so that anyone who holds the missing piece can see where it belongs. Each item links to its record. If you can close one, write in; corrections and additions are acknowledged on the corrections page.

Every record was reviewed for the September 2026 release; the questions here stand as of that review.

People

William Kidd: Early career before 1689 is thin. Birthplace: Dundee (very likely) versus Greenock (possible), unresolved. Birth year follows his 1695 deposition, which gives his age as 41 and so points to c. 1654; the traditional c. 1645 is recorded as the inherited convention. The forename Robert in the 1695 royal commission is treated as an attested documentary alias, not an error.
Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont: Confirm complete title and relevant letters.
Robert Culliford: Resolve aliases and chronology. He was at Ile Sainte-Marie when Kidd's crew deserted to him in 1698 (likely).
William Moore: Nothing is documented of Moore beyond his service as gunner and his death. The date (blow 30 October 1697, death the next day), the murder indictment and the object (a wooden bucket bound with iron) are fixed by the printed 1701 trial record.
Henry Every: Birth year and place are unresolved: 1659 at Newton Ferrers, 1653 at Cattedown, or c. 1656 from the Phillips deposition (possible). There are no endpoint documents for Every himself, no capture, trial, confession or death record; the corpus documents his crew and his crime, not his end. The pauper-death ending is legend from van Broeck (1709) and Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724).
Edward Thache (Blackbeard): Origins unresolved: Jamaica / Spanish Town (likely, the leading modern reconstruction, but the Brooks identification with the pirate is inferential) versus Bristol (possible, resting on Johnson, General History, Vol. 1 (1724) alone). No birth record for the pirate has been produced; c. 1680 is a back-calculation from apparent age at death, with an NPS c. 1660 outlier and a Brooks early-to-mid 1680s implication both recorded as disagreements. Surname in life is Thach/Thatch; Teach is a print standardisation via the Boston News-Letter and Johnson. The sources carry the Hornigold relationship as far as consort and second, and no further. No period source in evidence records him killing or seriously harming a captive before Ocracoke. The 1719 Williamsburg trial of his crew has no surviving primary court record.
John Rackham: Birth date and place are undocumented; the "26 December 1682, London" tradition has no basis. Service under Charles Vane, the 24 November 1718 deposing vote and the 1719 pardon are Johnson-only. The nickname "Calico Jack" (earliest Gosse 1924) and the skull over crossed swords flag (earliest Leip 1959) are post-period; the trial print records only a white pendant, and it is on Barnet's approaching sloop. The Kingston (11 December 1718) was taken by "one Thompson", not Rackham (CSP Colonial vol 31 item 34).
Anne Bonny: Everything before the August to November 1720 window is Johnson-only (possible) or later invention: the Cork birth, the attorney father, the Carolina years and the James Bonny marriage. The parental names "William Cormac" and "Peg Brennan" and the death about 1782 originate in John Carlova's 1964 novel Mistress of the Seas. Her fate after the 1720 reprieve is unknown; the 29 December 1733 St Catherine burial is the strongest candidate but is inferential (name, spelling and parish only; a separate Bonny family appears in the same registers).
Mary Read: The cause of death is undocumented (Johnson reports a fever; typhus is a modern gloss). No period evidence distinguishes her conduct from Bonny's; the trial individuates no act to her. The whole pre-1720 biography (English birth, boy's disguise, Flanders soldiering, the Three Horseshoes near Breda), the duel and the courtroom speech rest on Johnson 1724 alone (possible); no muster roll, marriage record or inn of that name has been traced. The courtroom speech is not only absent from the trial print but unstable in its wording: the writers who carry it do not quote it the same way twice. The original St Catherine register leaf, annotated "pirate", has not yet been examined; examining it would lift the burial to confirmed.
Bartholomew Roberts: The manner of death (grapeshot to the throat) rests on Johnson alone; Ogle's dispatch confirms the death, not the cause. The birth name John, the exact date 17 May 1682 and the birthplace Little Newcastle rest on scholarly assertion and local tradition, not on a parish register: the surviving Little Newcastle books begin only in 1783. Rank on the Princess (second mate versus master) is genuinely contradicted between good sources. The Martinique governor hanging remains open until the original deposition, CO 37/10, is read.
Woodes Rogers: The exact date of his first governor's commission (TNA CO 5/189/019) is unresolved: later writers give 6 January 1718, 6 February 1718 and 3 September 1717, and the Adam Matthew catalogue dates the patent 9 January 1717/18; only the patent image will settle it. Death 15 versus 16 July 1732 is unresolved, and no period death notice has been read. A Madagascar slaving voyage of 1713 to 1715 is reported but unverified from the primary record. A traditional Latin colony motto, its wording still to be verified, and the tradition that Johnson's General History was dedicated to or informed by Rogers both remain unverified. The December 1718 trial's one disputed hanged name (Golding versus Cunningham) and the trial manuscript (CO 23/13) remain open.
Adam Baldridge: Nothing read here gives a birth, a death or a later career past the deposition of 1699 and the marriage note of about 1700; the New York colonial documents behind that note, and the further Calendar pages for 1697 to 1698 and for 1700 that name him, have not been read directly and nothing on this page rests on them. The cause of the St Mary's rising of 1697 is genuinely open: Baldridge blames the privateers and their handling of the islanders, and Kidd, through Bellomont, blames Baldridge's slaving to Mascarene. The armament of his fort cannot be settled either, since his own figure of about eleven guns, Perkins's twenty-two and Watson's seven or eight cannot all be right.
Bartholomew Sharp: Neither end of his life is fixed: nothing read for this record gives his birth or his death, so his origin, his years before 1680 and everything after the 1682 trial stand open. The Stepney parish registers and the colonial records of the Danish West Indies remain to be searched. The spelling Sharpe circulates in museum catalogues, including for the diary at the Morgan Library, but no page carrying it has been read here. Nothing of the 1682 trial has been read except a defendant's own narrative, and the Admiralty record, Ringrose's manuscript in Sloane 3820, John Cox's in Sloane 49, the printed Bucaniers of America of 1685 and the manuscript atlases of the chart-maker William Hack all remain to be opened.
Benjamin Hornigold: Birth and parentage are undocumented: no baptism entry, parish record or other primary paper for his origins has been found. His death rests on a single passage in Johnson's General History (1724), which gives no date and no destination; the reef off Mexico and the voyage to New Spain were added by later writers, and no state paper, Colonial Office or Admiralty document of his death has been located. Three working problems remain open: a third spelling, Horngold, is reported in one account of Mathew Musson's letter of 5 July 1717 and was not found when the documents were searched; the two Colonial Office citations given for the Vickers deposition, CO 5/1264 No. 17i and CO 5/1317 Part 1 f.52, have not been reconciled; and the Vickers, Timberlake and Walker depositions, the trial papers enclosed with Rogers' letter of 24 December 1718, and the Spanish records at Seville have all been taken at second hand or not consulted.
Captain Lewis: No forename, birth date or place, trial record, colonial report or newspaper notice of this Lewis has been found, and the whole account rests on one chapter of Johnson's second volume. The Jamaica dispatches covering Bannister's execution have not been read, and they are the papers most likely to show whether boys were spared at that hanging. The log of the Sheerness and the Newfoundland station records would test the pursuit Johnson credits to Captain Tudor Trevor, and the calendared colonial items behind the 1700 index entry for a Captain Lewis remain to be read.
Charles Vane: Origins and nationality are not verified from the primary record: nothing but the Port Royal abode in the indictment stands behind the assumption that he was English. The service under Henry Jennings in the 1715 to 1716 salvage-camp raids, the hurricane wreck and marooning, the recapture through Captain Holford, the deposing for cowardice with John Rackham elected in his place, and the Ocracoke week with Blackbeard all rest on the General History of 1724 or on later writers, and no primary document read here carries any of them. The Admiralty papers of HMS Phoenix behind Vincent Pearce's deposition, and the office copies of the Bermuda depositions in CO 37/10, remain unconsulted.
Christopher Goffe: His birth, parentage and birthplace are established by nothing read for this record, and his death is not established by any record read for this account. The West Indies years between the Red Sea voyage and the 1687 surrender rest on later compilation, and a direct search of two pages of the Calendar of State Papers Colonial found no entry naming him, which settles nothing beyond those two pages. Everything else comes through one modern edition of 1923: the three Massachusetts Archives locations it transcribes, Vol. CXXVII leaves 10 and 191 and Vol. XXXVII leaf 117, carry the surrender, the commission and every quotation, and none of them has been read.
Christopher Moody: Nothing is established about his birth, parentage or home; the execution list gives his age as 28 and leaves the column for his habitation empty. His whole career rests on Johnson's first volume of 1724, which reproduces the Cape Corso Castle trial documents but has not been set beside the printed Tryals of 1723 or the High Court of Admiralty file. The captain he is confused with, William Moody of the Rising Sun, is a separate problem: the colonial papers that name him have not been collated against the Colonial Office manuscript, and their gun counts disagree. How that captain ended is not established from the primary record.
Condent: No forename is attested for him in any period source read: the 1728 chapter calls him only Captain Condent, and none has yet been established from the period documents. His part in the taking of the Cassandra at Johanna cannot stand as the chapter has it, since Macrae's own letter of 16 November 1720 describes two pirate ships, names Edward England as their chief captain and leaves the ship afterwards under Taylor. The French colonial record of his surrender at Bourbon has not been read at first hand, and no day, place or manner of death is recorded anywhere.
Edward England: Nothing establishes a birth, a birthplace, a nationality or a death; the tradition that he died in poverty on Madagascar is carried by no source read, and the book that carries everything else leaves him alive there. The whole career, the Cadogan and the murder of Skinner, the dated run of Guinea prizes, the Cassandra and the marooning, rests on one chapter of Charles Johnson's General History of 1724, and Captain Mackra's letter, the only eyewitness text in the story, was reached only inside that same chapter; an East India Company original of the letter would test the Cassandra material properly. Modern work proposing other identifications for the man has not been read.
Edward Low: The Newport admiralty print of 1723, which would settle the taking of the Ranger and the fate of the consort crew, has not been read, and neither have the Boston News-Letter for 1722 and 1723 nor the colonial state papers that would date his captures. Johnson carries almost no dates for the year between the parting from Lowther on 28 May 1722 and the Greyhound fight of 10 June 1723, and he disagrees with Ashton on the month and the name of the harbour where the New England fishermen were forced; his own chapter also gives twenty-five and twenty-six for the men hanged at Newport. The Westminster birth, the illiteracy and every specific cruelty rest on Johnson alone. Low's date of birth, the name of his brother and the manner of his end are not verified from the primary record.
Edward Mansvelt: His origin is not established. No primary document read for this record fixes his birthplace or nationality, no baptismal, naturalisation, trial or burial entry has been traced, and the Dutch, Curacao, Jamaica and Spanish colonial archives where one might sit have not been searched. The date, place and manner of his death are open in a new way. Exquemelin has him die at Tortuga without a date, and a deposition sworn on 19 August 1668 by Henry Wasey, master of the Concord, reports a vessel of Capt. Mansfield's brought in as prize at the Havannah, the commander ironed and said afterwards to have been put to death; the deposition does not say this was the man who took Providence, and the two accounts have not been reconciled or separated. The Modyford letters behind this record were read in Sainsbury's nineteenth-century calendar rather than in the manuscripts in Col. Papers, Vol. XX, and the 1678 Dutch and 1681 Spanish Exquemelin have not been collated against the 1684 English text.
Francis Spriggs: No period source read gives him a forename except Farrington, in the deposition of Roger Stevens of 6 May 1725 and the index to the same volume of the Calendar of State Papers; the form Francis is not verified from any period record. Birth, origin, nationality, age and appearance are nowhere recorded, and his end is open: Johnson loses track of him after June 1724, and a running fight with HMS Diamond on 31 August 1724 comes from the ship's logbook at one remove. The original depositions in C.O. 23, the logbooks of HMS Diamond and HMS Spence, the London Post-Boy of 25 June 1726, and the Boston News-Letter and American Weekly Mercury for 1724 are all unread.
Francois l'Olonnais: His existence, his origin at Les Sables d'Olone and every act laid to him rest on one narrative; no colonial letter, muster, prize account or Spanish casualty return naming him has been reached, and he was never tried, so nothing here has been tested by a court. The source gives no calendar year at all, which leaves the familiar 1630, 1667 and 1669 as later conventions and leaves birth, death and the order of the second voyage open. The modern birth name Jean-David Nau has no support in anything read, and a baptismal search at Les Sables d'Olonne is the next step; the death rests, even inside the one narrative, on a single unnamed informant.
George Lowther: His origins are unestablished: nothing read for this record gives a birthplace, a parent or a nationality, and no parish register or Royal African Company muster has been opened to look for one. The seizure of the Gambia Castle in June 1721, his rank as second mate under Charles Russel, the whole cruise from the Charles of Boston to the John and Elizabeth, and the Massey strand ending at Execution Dock all rest on A General History of the Pyrates, with the Royal African Company's T 70 series and the Old Bailey and Admiralty records still to be read. The capture day at Blanco is given as 5 October by Governor Hart and 15 October by Walter Moore, the manner of the death rests on report rather than on an eyewitness, and the minutes of the St Christopher's court are absent from the calendared despatch, so the names of the fourteen accused stand on the narrative alone.
Henry Jennings: Nothing is established before the commission of 21 November 1715: no birth, no parentage, no birthplace and no earlier career appear in any document read. The second commissioned commander is unresolved, Balchen naming Capt. Edward James beside Jennings while John Wills of the Eagle is given elsewhere; the plunder stands at two figures, the captors' admitted 120,000 pieces of eight besides wrought silver and the General History's 350,000 lying on the spot. The end is blank: he was pardoned and never tried, and the Pennsylvania Gazette notice of 4 July 1745 naming a Henry Jennings has not been read against the paper itself and may belong to another man.
Henry Morgan: The birthplace is unsettled. Welsh genealogy gives Llanrhymney in Glamorgan, Crooke's 1685 apology gives the county of Monmouth, and Penkarne, sometimes offered as a third, appears in Morgan's own will as a Jamaican estate; no Welsh baptismal record has been opened. The cruelties told of Puerto Principe, Porto Bello, Maracaibo and Panama all descend from Exquemelin, several of them retracted by name in the publisher's 1685 correction, and no court ever ruled on any of them. The state paper originals behind the commission, the treaty, the recall and the knighthood have not been reached: those dates rest on reproductions in the 1935 biography, the passages quoted from the calendared papers are a Victorian editor's abstract, and the edition of Exquemelin opened here is abridged.
Howell Davis: The forename is one printer's word: Johnson's chapter heading supplies Howel and Snelgrave, who met the man, supplies no forename at all. Johnson's birthplace puts Milford in Monmouthshire, but Milford Haven is in Pembrokeshire, and nothing else read chooses between the town and the county, so the birth stays open. Almost the whole cruise, from the Cadogan through the Cape Verdes, Gambia Castle, Cape Three Points and Anamaboe, is Johnson's alone and carries no calendar dates, and his own Roberts chapter dates Roberts's arrival on the coast after Davis was dead; no official paper naming Davis has been found, with the Royal African Company books in T 70 and the Board of Trade papers in CO 388 still unread.
John Bowen: Nothing outside Charles Johnson's History of the Pyrates, Vol. II (1728), has been found that names Bowen, so the forename John, the Bermuda birth, the Carolina first voyage and every capture attributed to him stand on that book alone. Whether his company took the Speedy Return, the piracy for which Thomas Green was hanged at Leith in April 1705, is the open question: William Foster's 1930 editorial note carries the loss of the ship and the wrongfulness of the execution, but names no commander. No date of death, no place of burial and no official paper of any kind has been found for him.
John Martel: His origin is unsettled: the Boston News-Letter, reporting a man he robbed, calls him a French pirate with a mostly French crew, while Johnson guessed him a Jamaica privateersman of the preceding war and admitted he had not looked into it. The identification of the captain at Santa Cruz as Martel rests on Johnson alone, since the calendared abstract of Governor Hamilton's report and the volume index carry no such name; the manuscript enclosures at The National Archives (C.O. 152/11 Nos. 57 i-ix) and the log book of HMS Scarborough have not been read and are the papers most likely to settle it. His fate is unrecorded, the two Johnson accounts of it disagree, and he was never tried, so nothing attributed to him has been adjudicated.
John Quelch: Nothing is established about him before August 1703. No parish entry, marriage or earlier ship has been found, and the London birth rests on the age of about thirty-eight set down in the trial record's own list. Whether Captain Daniel Plowman was put over the side alive or dead is left open by the record, which states that he died while the witness James Parrot said he was thrown overboard, and Anthony Holding, named as the man behind the confinement, escaped and was never tried. The Boston News-Letter issues, the dying-speeches broadsheet and Cotton Mather's two imprints touching the case have not been read in their original states and remain queued, so the gallows words and the accounting of the gold reach the page through Dow and Edmonds.
John Taylor: No forename is attested: Johnson never supplies one, and nothing else read supplies one either. Nothing establishes a birth, an origin, a nationality or a death, and there is no court record because no court ever tried him; he surrendered at Porto Bello and, by report only, took a commission in the Spanish service afterwards. The whole career rests on one chapter of Charles Johnson's General History of 1724, so that an East India Company original of Captain Mackra's letter would test the Cassandra material properly, and the Portuguese record of the Goa prize would settle its date, the ship's name and whether England was still with the company when she was taken.
Josiah Burgess: The forename is unsettled and probably wrong: no period source read supports "Josiah", and the one period forename is the initial "T." in Johnson's roll of the Providence commanders, which some modern writers expand to Thomas. His birth, his birthplace, the name of his sloop and any prize he took are all missing from the period record, and the pardon he is thought to have taken in 1718 rests on inference, no certificate carrying his name having been found. The deposition of John Vickers (C.O. 5/1317, 1716) and Capt. Vincent Pearse's returns of those who took certificates of protection at Providence in early 1718 are the documents most likely to settle his associations and his pardon, and neither has been read.
Nicholas Brown: Nothing is established about his life before Providence: no birth, no parentage, no trade, no first ship. The date and manner of his death are open; November 1726 is what later writers give, and the calendared papers read for late 1726 do not mention it. Whether any reward was ever offered for him is not verified from the primary record. The Jamaica act or proclamation that would record such a reward, Boyer's Political State of Great Britain for 1726 and the Boston News-Letter for 1726 to 1727 are the papers most likely to settle these, and none has been read.
Olivier Levasseur: The name is the open question, and the identification is held no higher than the forename that carries it, which is Johnson's alone, the surname not established from any record read here and the man himself being secure only as the Frenchman Snelgrave saw at Sierra Leone in April 1719. Nothing establishes a birth, a birthplace or a death, and no indictment, trial minute or deposition naming him has been verified from the primary papers; the 1721 Bourbon prize on which his later fame rests is credited by Johnson to Taylor, with England already marooned, and la Bouche is not named at it. The French colonial records of Bourbon, which would settle whether he was hanged there, and the Portuguese record of the Goa prize are queued and unread.
Richard Worley: The South Carolina Vice-Admiralty journal and a contemporary dispatch naming Worley still need direct inspection; the continuous narrative conflicts with the colonial dates and place.
Robert Livingston: The day of his birth rests on genealogies with no parish register read; the day of his marriage, 9 July 1679, likewise awaits the Albany church record, and the day of the manor patent stands at 22 or 26 July 1686 depending on which genealogy is used. What became of the security he posted for the Kidd venture is not known: no proceeding against it after Kidd's conviction has been found, the bond itself has not been located among his surviving papers, and neither the state papers nor the Exchequer records have been searched for it. Apart from the published transcript of the articles of 7 February 1695/6 (GLC03107.00239), the manuscript core has been mapped only from finding aids and catalogue records, much of it is in Dutch, and the circulating portrait of him has no established artist, date, medium or owner.
Samuel Bellamy: His birth is not established. A Devon parish carries one identification and the year about 1689, but that parish register has not been read for this record, Plymouth is given by the scholarly account of the wreck, and London is what Bellamy said of himself to Abijah Savage in November 1716. No remains have been identified as his: a leg bone tested in 2018 against a living descendant proved to be another man's, of eastern Mediterranean ancestry, and the analysis of the six skeletons recovered from the wreck in 2021 has not been published in a peer-reviewed study. Whether the free prince speech printed by Johnson in 1728 is his is not established, Johnson naming only a Captain Bellamy without a forename; the Maria Hallett romance is Cape Cod folklore whose developed form dates from 1934.
Stede Bonnet: Nothing is established about him before 1717: his birth, his parentage and his marriage are not verified from the primary record, and the Christ Church baptismal records at Barbados that would settle the first of them have not been read. The 1719 printing of the Tryals has not been read from end to end, so its wording reaches this record only through page-cited excerpts and through Johnson's reproduction of the court documents; the Library of Congress page images, David Herriot's deposition, the Rhett account prefatory to the print and the Boston News-Letter reports of 1718 are all located and unread. Two figures are unreconciled and are carried both ways: eighteen of the King's men killed at Cape Fear on Trott's charge against Johnson's tally of twelve, and ten guns and seventy men at the fitting out against the eight guns and fifty men of Governor Robert Johnson's despatch.
Thomas Anstis: The personal name is one book's word: the chapter heading and opening sentence of Charles Johnson's General History supply both surname and forename, and the calendared colonial papers that record the same company name the Good Fortune, the Morning Star and the consort John Fenn without ever naming him. His origins are blank, with no birthplace, parentage, age, nationality or description anywhere in the material read, and his death, shot in his hammock by his own crew in 1723, rests on Johnson alone against Governor Hart's report of the brigantine escaping Tobago with twelve men and no death in it. The manuscript petition at C.O. 323, 8. Nos. 32 and 32.i has not been collated against the version Johnson prints, which differs in date, addressee and number of documents.
Thomas Green: Green's parentage, birth and everything before the Worcester's East India voyage are undocumented, and no birth date has been verified from the primary record. The vessel named in the libel is only Captain Drummond's ship belonging to the Scots African Company; the identification with the Speedy Return comes from the Dictionary of National Biography and the later record rather than from the printed proceedings. The London tracts of 1705, the reprint of the trial in the Complete Collection of State Trials, William Roughead's essay on the case, and the books of Alexander Hamilton and Robert Drury have not been read for this record, and the Portsmouth affidavit of 30 March 1705 is known here only at second hand.
Thomas Paine: No contemporary document read for this record names him in either action; the colonial papers behind the later tradition remain to be recovered.
Thomas Pound: The original Suffolk County court file and Massachusetts archive papers have not been read directly, and his later naval career still rests on a later biographical source.
Thomas Tew: His origins are unestablished: no birthplace, parentage or date of birth was located for this record, and the Bermuda and Rhode Island registers that might carry them have not been opened. The original commission Governor Fletcher gave him at New York, and the bond that went with it, have not been read; the calendared abstract that stands in for them gives no date, so the commission cannot yet be dated. The value of the first Red Sea prize is contested between three figures that differ by more than twofold, and Edward Randolph's own report of the money landed in Rhode Island has not been read. The ship that killed him and the month of his death were not found in the documents read, and the articles, the motto and the disembowelling scene attributed to him belong to a standalone chapter of A General History of the Pyrates absent from the edition used here.
Thomas White: No deposition, company paper, Admiralty record or colonial paper naming this Thomas White has been recovered, so his chronology remains a single-source account.
Valentine Ashplant: His birth, family and the vessel he mastered seven years before trial remain unidentified.
William Dampier: The baptism at East Coker in 1651 and the death in London in 1715 are not yet verified from the primary record; the East Coker parish register and the will proved on 23 March 1715 would settle both, and the burial place is not established. The Admiralty file for the court-martial of 8 June 1702, the commission that sent the St George to sea in 1703, and the two printed accounts of that voyage, William Funnell's and Dampier's own answer to it, have none of them been read, so the quarrel that wrecked the voyage stands as the parties left it. The later chapters of his own New Voyage, Woodes Rogers's narrative and Edward Cooke's account of the same cruise, and Lionel Wafer's book on the party that recrossed the Isthmus in 1681, are all still to be read.
William Fly: Nothing is established about him before the snow sailed from Jamaica in April 1726: no birth, parentage, nationality or earlier service, and the only statement of origin found is a London printing of a Boston dispatch saying all three condemned men were born in the West of England. Mather gives his age at death as about twenty-seven and does not say how he knew it. Johnson's General History, second volume of 1728, is reported to head its chapter with a different forename, but that volume has not been read, and neither have the Boston News-Letter or the New-England Courant for June and July 1726, so the forename variance is a report and not a disagreement between sources that have been compared. The two Boston prints also differ on the day of the sentence, Mather giving 3 July against the court's own 4 July.
William Howard: Nothing before 1717 or after his release in 1718 is documented: no birth, no parentage, no death, no port he came from, and no record of where he went once freed. The quartermaster's rank rests on two words in Spotswood's letter, and the tradition identifying him with the William Howard who bought Ocracoke Island in 1759 is an inference that the genealogist Dora Padgett contradicted on grounds of age. No minute of the court that convicted him has been located, and the pardon cutoff stands at 18 August in Spotswood's letter against 23 July in a secondary account.
William May: Nothing before 1694 is documented: no age, birth year, baptism, parish or likeness has been found, and the age of forty-eight given him by popular lists traces to no document. He is absent from both 1696 proclamations and from the out-of-court examinations of John Dann and Philip Middleton, so almost every word of him comes from one printed trial; whether the High Court of Admiralty examinations at HCA 1/53 hold a first-person examination of him has not been established. The captain of the Pearl who sailed in company with Every at the mouth of the Red Sea is a different man, William Mayes or Mues of Rhode Island, and the further identification of that captain with the Newport tavern keeper's son rests on later writers and is carried by no document.

Ships

Adventure Galley: Specifications, builders and exact crew complement remain open. She was launched at Deptford late in 1695 (likely) and abandoned, worn out, at Ile Sainte-Marie in 1698; whether she was burned or left to founder is contested (possible).
Quedagh Merchant: The 1701 murder-and-piracy indictment records Armenian owners, an English commander named Wright, and a cargo of opium, raw silk, muslins, calicoes and sugar. The form of her name still varies across the records (Quedagh, Quedah, or Cara Merchant). Kidd renamed her the Adventure Prize; her hull was located off Catalina Island, Dominican Republic, in 2007.
Fancy: The 17 July 1696 Lords Justices proclamation describes her as 46 guns and 130 men. Her tonnage, builder and build date are not established by anything read for this record, and the three-hundred-ton Dutch-built Fancy that Johnson mentions elsewhere is a different vessel and does not fill the gap. Every's own declaration gives her forty-six guns and about 150 men, and the proclamation printed at Edinburgh on 18 August 1696 gives the same forty-six guns and about 130, so the armament is documented twice and the complement is not reconciled. Her fate after the company left her at Providence is not established: Johnson has them sell her there, and no wreck has been identified.
Ganj-i-Sawai: The printed trial gives no day-date for the taking, only 'ten Leagues from the Cape St. Iohns near Surat'; the commonly cited 7 September 1695 comes from secondary work, and the 28 September 1695 indictment date belongs to the separate smaller Moorish prize. Her master is recorded as Muhammad or Ibrahim Khan. The plunder value is irreconcilable across the sources and is presented as a range. Her armament is unsettled between eighty guns in the Mughal chronicle and about sixty-two from later writers, and nothing of the ship herself survives: no builder's record, no tonnage, no wreck and no material remains, with nothing recorded of her at all after she was released to Surat.
Queen Anne's Revenge: Origin documented in the French depositions of Dosset and Ernaud (Nantes, Serie B 4578; Ducoin research report for the QAR project), known here only through the QAR project's citations; the originals are not yet in evidence. Capture 28 November 1717 new style equals about 17 November old style, one event. Grounding about 10 June 1718; deliberate versus accidental is disputed in the period record itself (Herriot's deposition alleges intent, Brand's letter implies accident). Wreck discovered 21 November 1996, identified 29 August 2011; discovery confirmed, identification very likely and expressly a cumulative deduction, not a single-artefact proof. Archaeology is held as a separate evidence class from the documentary record.
Royal Fortune: The exact day the Onslow was taken is given as 5 or 8 August 1721. The specifications of the last Royal Fortune (40 guns, 152 men, 52 of them of African descent) come from Ogle's dispatch in the London Gazette; no wreck or physical remains have been identified.
HMS Swallow: The Swallow's captains' log (ADM 51/954) and pay book (ADM 33/308) survive at The National Archives but are not digitised; the Swallow master's log run has a gap over the battle date, so ADM 52/316 (Weymouth) is the continuous masters' record across 10 February 1722. Ogle was rewarded after the action; the honour (a knighthood) is carried in the wider literature but no documentary basis for it is yet in evidence, and it is left as an open item rather than asserted.
Adventure (Blackbeard's sloop): Whether the sloop taken at Ocracoke was Herriot's eighty-ton logwood sloop, taken at Turneff in April 1718 and lost at Topsail Inlet in June, or another vessel carrying the same name, is not established, and this is the central caution of the record. Her armament is given as eight guns by Spotswood, ten by the Boston News-Letter and nine by a modern account, and the three have not been reconciled. No wreck or physical remains have been identified, and her tonnage, build and rig are absent from the papers read for this record; the name of the second hired sloop at Ocracoke and the 2500 pounds said to have been raised by her sale both wait on Brand's and Maynard's reports and the Williamsburg court record.
Amity: Her burden, guns and crew rest on a single trader's figures, and John Dann's lower count of about six guns and fifty men has never been reconciled with them. The Bermuda commission of December 1692 has been described but not read, and the Barbados provenance under Captain Richard Gilbert rests on modern work rather than on the depositions. Her end is hearsay, and it is not settled whether the brigantine of the same name that came into St Mary's on 17 January 1696/7 was this hull rebuilt or a Barbados namesake.
Batchelor's Delight: Her name rests on one sentence in one participant's book: Wafer names her, Dampier never does, and no calendared colonial paper found so far names her at all. Her nationality and original name before capture are unsettled, the Danish attribution and the name Charlotte Amalia coming from later writers while the only participant to describe the taking gives her neither, and the armament diverges between Cowley's forty guns in 1683 and Dampier's thirty-six in 1685. What became of her after the company came out of the South Sea is not established from any document read.
Cassandra: Her tonnage of about 380, her 26 guns, her crew of about 76, her builder and her launch date all come from a ship database said to derive from Company journals and the India Office marine papers; nothing from the Company's own files has been read for this record. The day of her taking is 17 August 1720 in Macrae's letter and 7 August in that database, and the same database has her retaken by the Falkland man of war in February 1722, which will not sit beside the chapter of Captain England in A General History of the Pyrates, where her company surrenders at Porto Bello. No wreck has been identified, and the treasure wreck off Sainte-Marie in Madagascar belongs to the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, a prize rather than a captor.
Charles II: No builder's certificate, tonnage, build place or build year has been found for her, and the gun counts do not agree: forty in the 1696 indictment, forty-six in later accounts that call her a privateer, and thirty odd in Johnson's General History of 1724, which also calls her the Duke and puts her owners at Bristol. The date of the seizure is unsettled, the indictment laying it on the thirtieth of May 1694 where the witness David Creagh and the later accounts give the night of 7 May. Why she was named the Charles the Second is not established by anything read for this record, and the three witnesses who described the boat that left her give three different counts of the men in it.
Cygnet: Her tonnage, dimensions, rig, builder and build date are nowhere in the record read for this account, and no contemporary paper of her London owners was found. Almost every fact about her rests on William Dampier's printed narrative, and everything after May 1688 is what he was told at Achin by former shipmates and by two other captains, so the leaky passage to Coromandel and the sinking at St. Augustin Bay stand on hearsay inside a first-hand book. The number of men left ashore with Swan at Mindanao is unreadable in the copy consulted, and the killing of Swan itself is told two incompatible ways, as an overturned canoe at the river mouth and as a chase and a spear.
Duke: Where and when she was built is unsettled: no builder's record, survey or shipping register has been traced, and she appears first fitting out at Bristol in 1708. Her armament is unsettled in the same way, Rogers giving her 30 guns and the owners' agreement printed by Cooke 36, and the complement of the Manila prize she took differs between printings, 193 men against 195. What became of her hull after she came up to Erith on 14 October 1711 is not recorded, and no wreck or physical remains have been identified.
Dutchess: Her builder, her build place and her build year are not established: no builder's record, survey or shipping register has been traced, and the sources read for this record have her only fitting out at Bristol in 1708. Her measurements, her guns and her people come from one printed journal kept aboard the other ship, and no muster book, owners' account or letter of marque for her has been read. What became of her after she came up to Erith on 14 October 1711 is followed by nothing read here, and no wreck or physical remains have been identified.
Flying Dragon: Nothing survives that describes the ship herself: the 1728 chapter gives her no tonnage, no gun-count and no complement, and no register, log or prize-court paper for her has been located, so the twenty to thirty guns and hundred and fifty men given her by later writers rest on nothing. Her prize list is not securely her own: it has not been established from the primary record that the captures the chapter is best known for were made by this ship, and the chapter itself and a named archaeological report on the Nossa Senhora do Cabo wreck at Ile Sainte-Marie are wanted before anything further is said about them. Her end is given twice and differently, sunk at Ile Sainte-Marie as a condition of the Bourbon pardon in the 1728 chapter and burnt at Madagascar in the intelligence letter reported in the first volume of 1724, and the two documents that name her, a French periodical and the deposition of Richard Moor, have been read only through a modern historian's article and are queued for direct consultation.
Fortune: The captured vessel's earlier name, ownership, dimensions and final disposition have not been found, and it must be kept distinct from Good Fortune and the several Royal Fortunes.
Good Fortune: Her armament, tonnage, dimensions and rig are nowhere recorded; Johnson describes her only as of far less force than the 32-gun Morning Star and as an excellent sailer, and no prize condemnation, registry entry or builder's record has been found for the Rhode Island brigantine she was before the renaming. Her command is a straight conflict: Johnson's chapters make her Thomas Anstis's ship from the desertion of 18 April 1721, while Governor Hart's letter of 8 June 1723 has Captain Finn three years in her as her commander and never names Anstis. Her end is unresolved, the surrender of the vessel at Curacao resting on Johnson alone and undated, with no Dutch or colonial paper read for this record noticing her arrival and no wreck, salvage site or artefact identified.
Greyhound: Her force is agreed at twenty guns and 120 men by Johnson's chapter and by Solgard's report, but that is the establishment and the number aboard on the day of the action is nowhere stated. Her build, her dimensions, her cost and her career before and after 1723 are not established from the primary record: no draught, survey, dockyard account or despatch has been opened, and Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, would settle the builder, the launch date and the rating. Johnson's Greyhound galley of about March 1722, Captain Walron, surprised at dinner on the coast, is not shown by anything read here to be this ship. The count of the pirates hanged at Newport on 19 July 1723 stands at twenty-six in the newspaper account and in the New York minute Johnson prints, against twenty-five in Johnson's own printed list, and the number of men taken out of the prize is given as forty-two white and six black in the contemporary newspaper against thirty-seven white in a later article.
HMS Mermaid: The pirate episode rests on one narrative and does not by itself settle which rebuild of Mermaid was present or identify every officer aboard.
Kingston: The surviving account does not establish her builder, dimensions, armament or later career, and similarly named vessels must be kept separate.
Mocha Frigate: Her build, her burthen and her Company armament are all open: no builder's certificate, East India Company ship list or survey of her was located, later writers give about 250 and about 350 tons while Theophilus Turner, who had sailed in her, deposed to 400 tons and 40 guns, and the thirty-six guns given her as a Company ship rest on a web account alone. Her purchase for the Company as the Supply about 1694 is reported on one modern database and is not corroborated by any contemporary paper read here. Her end is the largest gap: no document read for this record carries her fate, the scuttling across the Ile Sainte-Marie harbour entrance about January 1699 and the sub-bottom readings said to be consistent with her come from a contested survey project, and the last independent sighting of her is Turner's, at Port St. Mary about Christmas 1698.
New Year's Gift: No piracy-era vessel of this name has been found in the calendars and narratives searched; newspaper shipping lists and company records remain the best leads.
Oxford: The exact day, the ignition source and the casualty total differ or remain unstated in the surviving accounts.
Pearl: The identity between the raiding vessel and the Pearl seized at Boston is an inference; her construction, armament and later fate lack a contemporary survey.
Portsmouth Adventure: The suggested earlier name Black Barque, the tonnage and the vessel's fate after the Red Sea cruise remain unconfirmed by the primary record read here.
Providence galley: Her ownership before capture, the relation between the different gun totals and her fate under the name Alexander remain unsettled.
Ranger: Her builder, civilian ownership and history before Edward Low's company have not been recovered; she must be kept distinct from the Rangers of Vane and Roberts.
Ranger (Roberts's consort): No builder, tonnage, dimensions or rig is recorded for her, and her French name before the pirates took her is not established; modern accounts making her the sixteen-gun Comte de Toulouse conflict with the thirty-two guns given in Ogle's report and in the charge read at Cape Corso Castle. Her complement is 132 men on Ogle's report and about 113 on Johnson's, and her dead are ten by Johnson's tally against twenty-six killed and wounded by Ogle's; neither pair has been reconciled. How the 24-gun ship the pirates abandoned under Cape Lopez stands to the Little Ranger storeship of Johnson's narrative is unresolved, and no wreck, artefact or other physical trace of her has been identified.
Revenge, later Royal James: No builder's certificate, no certificate of registry and no survey of the sloop have been found, so her dimensions, her tonnage and her rig come out of narrative, with no ship's paper to test them against. The trial gives her no gun count: ten guns is Johnson's figure for the Barbados fitting alone, and the twelve guns and then eight guns that circulate for her later career come from later accounts. She was taken whole rather than wrecked, no site or material remains have been identified, and what became of the hull after she was carried into Charles Town in October 1718 is in none of the sources read.
Rose Pink: The accounts disagree over her earlier character and name, and no document read here fixes what became of her after Low's 1723 cruise.
Royal James: What she mounted under this name is not established: no figure for her guns or her company at the Cape Fear fight has been traced to a document, and the ten guns and about seventy men often quoted for her belong to her earlier fitting out at Barbados on Johnson's word alone. When she was renamed is also open, Johnson placing it at the end of July 1718 on the passage from Delaware Bay to Cape Fear and other accounts placing it earlier, at Topsail Inlet. No builder's certificate, registry or survey of her survives, no wreck exists because she was taken whole, and nothing read for this record says what became of the hull after October 1718.
Satisfaction: No primary source read here calls the ship Satisfaction; its name and tonnage rest on later works, while the number of ships lost varies between accounts.
Sloop William: This is a duplicate catalogue identity. The proclamation names William, while the trial calls the pirate sloop unnamed; no separate Sloop William has been found.
Snapper: Colonial newspaper shipping lists have not been searched fully. Until a period notice names a vessel, no owner, voyage, dimensions or pirate association can be assigned.
Speaker: Her build history, tonnage and exact armament are not established: no builder's certificate, ownership papers or East India Company or naval survey of her was located, and the 50 and 54 gun figures come from the second volume of The History of the Pyrates while the 450 tons appears only in later accounts. That narrative settles neither the place nor the month of her seizure and leaves the captain who lost her unnamed. The reef name St. Thomas's Reef is not joined by anything read to the surveyed site off the mouth of the Grande Riviere Sud-Est, and the narrative's own chronology, which ends the company's three months on Mauritius about the middle of March 1701, runs about a year before the 1702 dating carried by the archaeology and by the Dutch-derived scholarship.
Victory: Her name is carried by A General History of the Pyrates alone: Captain Macrae's letter and A Compendious History of the Indian Wars, the two first-hand accounts read for this record, name only the Fancy and the Cassandra, and Macrae, who fought both pirate ships, tells them apart by what they did rather than by name. Which of the two carried thirty-four guns and which thirty is therefore unsettled, and so is the pairing of captain to hull, since the arrangement later writers make, putting Taylor in the Victory, runs against the same narrative, in which England fits up the Peterborough and calls her the Victory himself. No contemporary ship's register, builder's certificate, survey or muster was located, and no wreck or object has been attributed to her.
Whydah Gally: Her building is not established: neither the place and year of her launch nor the merchant who paid for her is verified from a document read for this record, and no builder's certificate or contemporary paper of her ownership has been located. Nothing read for this record counts the people she carried out of West Africa on her first voyage, so her identity as a slaving ship rests on her homeward cargo and her name. The place where Bellamy took her is unsettled, the Windward Passage of the popular accounts standing against Lieutenant Governor Bennett's despatch of 30 July 1717, which has Prince taken among the Bahama Islands, and this Archive carries both; the day is no closer than the end of February 1717, and her dead are given as more than a hundred and as the hundred and two Southack buried, while the traditional figure of about 145 has no source behind it.
William: The name rests on one document, Woodes Rogers' proclamation as reprinted in the Boston Gazette, and the original issue has not been examined; the 1721 trial print calls her a sloop of an unknown name throughout, as does Governor Lawes' letter of 13 November 1720. The transcriptions of the proclamation disagree over whether she carried one swivel gun or two, and the tonnage of about twelve tons comes from the same document. No builder, year, place of building or survey has been found, the day Barnet took her is not in the print, and nothing read records what became of the hull afterwards; no wreck or artefact is attributed to her.

Places

Madagascar: Ile Sainte-Marie (Nosy Boraha) is the anchorage where Kidd met Culliford and lost most of his crew in 1698 (likely). Other anchorages relevant to his stay remain to be fixed.
Nassau / New Providence: The island (New Providence) and the town (Charles Town to 1684, Nassau after the rebuilding) are kept distinct on every page. The founding year of Charles Town, the rename under Governor Nicholas Trott, and the early-1700s Franco-Spanish raid dates (Johnson's 1700 against the later 1703 that circulates and the 'twice during the war' of the 1705/06 Lords address) are not yet verified from the primary record; the Colonial State Papers would settle them and are not yet in evidence here. Harbour-entrance coordinates are derived from Johnson's two-inlets description, not a survey. The CO 700 (Bahamas) charts are catalogued but mostly undigitised.
Anguilla: Deputy Governor Abraham Howell's letter of 31 December 1688 is the only writing from Anguilla itself, and the place he calls the Road is matched to no anchorage on any chart of the period. For William Kidd's call of April 1699 the day of the month, the anchorage, whether he went ashore himself and the name of his informant are all open; the Colonial Office correspondence for the Leewards in 1699 at Kew, calendared as Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies volume 17, and the High Court of Admiralty examinations of his crew in 1699 and 1700 would answer them. Two datings of that call stand against each other, the Council of Nevis putting it twenty days before 18 May and Kidd's own narrative about the beginning of April, and no third document decides between them. The six men of the Royal Rover put ashore in 1720 are given two fates, Governor Hamilton reporting them tried and under sentence of death and a Bermuda news-sheet enclosed in Lieutenant Governor Bennett's despatch of 31 March 1720 giving two in gaol at Antigua with the rest sent for; the Leeward Islands admiralty proceedings would settle which is right. The island wants a chart of the Golden Age years, soundings for its road, and any count of its people earlier than Governor Hart's of 1724, and no wreck, fortification or careening site on it has been tied to the period. The French form of the island's name and the Amerindian name Malliouhana rest on no document.
Antigua: The 1723 trial numbers do not close: the Calendar gives nine taken, two made witnesses, seven tried, seven convicted, five executed, one reprieved at the gallows, one Portuguese acquitted and Finn gibbeted, which cannot all stand without an unstated assumption about whether Finn falls inside or outside the five. C.O. 152, 14, ff. 223-225 and 226v.-230v. at The National Archives, with enclosure 576.i (the Antigua minutes of Council for April and May 1723) and the court's own record if it survives, would settle both that count and the Finn / Fenn spelling, which remains open. Almost the whole Antiguan pirate record reaches the researcher through Cecil Headlam's printed Calendar of State Papers Colonial, an abstract rather than a transcript, and the archival citation for Abijah Savage's deposition is disputed between the Calendar (C.O. 152, 11, Nos. 45, 45 i.-vi.) and a widely read secondary account (C.O. 157/11, no. 45 iii). No island-wide count of enslaved people in Antigua for any year between 1690 and 1725 has been verified, no period soundings or pilotage notes for St John's Harbour or English Harbour have been retrieved, and no pre-1725 dedicated survey map of the island has been located. The identity of the founder of the first English settlement on the island is not established from the primary record, and the identification of the Calendar's Louis de Boure with Olivier Levasseur, called La Buse, is not verified.
The Bahamas: The colony's own turning points are not yet verified from the primary record: the date of the principal Franco-Spanish raid on New Providence, which later writers put in July 1703 and in October 1703 alike, and the number and dates of the raids said to have followed in 1706 or 1709, are unsettled. The constitutional dates are equally unsettled, the surrender of government being placed in 1717 and the crown-colony status in 1717 or 1718, Woodes Rogers's commission dated 6 January or 6 February 1718, his arrival at Nassau being fixed at 26 July 1718 by his own despatch; the formal name of the company of co-partners who financed him has not been retrieved. CO 23 at Kew, the Privy Council series PC 2 and the Calendar of State Papers Colonial for 1717 to 1718 are the series that would settle these, and none has been read through. No reliable figure for the enslaved population of the islands between 1690 and 1725 has been retrieved, and the pardon figures that circulate, from Pearse's 209 of February 1718 to the approximately 1,000 credited to Rogers, count different populations at different dates and must not be merged into a total. No period soundings for any Bahamian harbour or channel have been retrieved, and no excavation report, site record or object catalogue for any golden-age pirate-associated site in the islands; the Bahamian maritime archaeology available is Spanish-colonial rather than piratical, and the responsible national body's public catalogue could not be read.
Barbados: The island's own archive is absent. The Barbados correspondence at The National Archives, Kew, CO 28 (original correspondence) and CO 29 (entry books), together with the Council and Assembly minutes calendared in the Colonial series, would supply the governors between Robert Lowther and Henry Worsley, the ground of Lowther's censure, the island's own account of Stede Bonnet, and any commission or despatch on the pirate trade; none of it is here. The vessels the island fitted out against Bartholomew Roberts rest on Johnson's General History alone: he gives no date and names only Captain Rogers of Bristol and Captain Graves of the island, and the names Summerset and Philipa, once carried on this record, are not his and are not carried now. The ABH and AMH flag tradition has never been traced to its earliest printed occurrence, so the Archive does not carry it and shows no reconstruction. Stede Bonnet's christening at Christ Church parish on 29 July 1688 and his marriage of 1709 want the Barbados parish registers, and the Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet, and Other Pirates, printed for Benjamin Cowse in 1719, has not been read in any copy. Carlisle Bay's soundings, bar and holding ground are unestablished: Ligon gives none, and no chart of the road has been examined. The naming of the island and the arrivals of 1625 and 1627 rest on nothing here, and the Barbados settlement records would settle them. The pre-1740 hurricane record for the island is a blank in the printed compilations rather than in the weather, and no surviving Barbadian object, wreck or structure can be linked to any pirate. Denmark fort, named in a Council minute of December 1688, is the only fortification on the island for which a document has been read, and its position, armament and later history are all open.
Beaufort Inlet (Topsail Inlet): No manuscript piece reference has been established for either of the two governing primary sources: the original of David Herriot's deposition, with the evidence of Ignatius Pell, which should be traced in the Colonial Office series for South Carolina at Kew and against the printed London edition of the Bonnet trials, and Captain Ellis Brand's letter of 12 July 1718, most probably in the Admiralty captains' letters. The date of the grounding is on or about 10 June 1718 and should not be hardened. Whether the grounding was deliberate turns on the credibility of a single witness testifying under an arrangement for clemency, and will be moved, if at all, by the Brand letters, the Spotswood correspondence in the Virginia records and the Charleston trial papers rather than by further archaeology. The number marooned is unresolved between about fifteen and seventeen, and the sandy island or shoal they were left on has never been identified on the ground. The mortality and disposal figures for the 516 enslaved Africans embarked aboard La Concorde at Whydah are internally inconsistent in the project literature and would be settled only in the Nantes admiralty and merchant papers and the slaving voyage databases. The thirty-seven magnetic anomalies logged inside the inlet in 2000 have never been dived, and if the sloop Adventure survives anywhere it is most likely among them. The name Old Topsail Inlet has not been established as belonging to this place, so every period occurrence of the Topsail name must be read against its geography before it is assigned to this inlet.
Bermuda: This page rests on printed calendars, transcripts, depositions and popular history rather than on the manuscript correspondence in Colonial Office and predecessors: Bermuda, Original Correspondence, CO 37, at The National Archives, Kew, a series whose covering dates could not be read from the catalogue, or in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies on British History Online, where no individual Bermuda entry was verified. Four questions wait on those papers and on the Bermuda Council minutes and commission books: whether Thomas Tew's commission from Isaac Richier dates from 1691, with the reported fee of 300 pounds, or from December 1692; where John Trimingham's report of 23 April 1700 on three Bermuda sloops taken in the Bay of Campeche sits in the calendar, and who the pirate was, later writers naming him Lewis Ferdinando; whether Benjamin Bennett or Samuel Day held the government when commissions were issued in 1699 and 1700 against the pirate then taking Bermuda sloops; and whether the Vice-Admiralty court at Bermuda dates from 1687 or from 1696. No period soundings, bar depths or careening grounds are stated because none were retrieved from a catalogued source, Thomas Hurd's hydrographic survey of 1789 to 1797 postdating the window, and the Bermuda Archives and Bermuda National Library were not searched at item level. No excavated wreck listed by the National Museum of Bermuda falls squarely inside 1690 to 1725, the Stonewall Wreck of about 1685 and the cedar-built Hunter Galley of 1752 bracketing the period.
Boston: The exact site of the Boston pirate gallows is unfixed: the 1704 print places it in Charles River between Broughton's Warehouse and the Point, which cannot be located on a shoreline since made and cut, and Bonner's 1722 map read against the Boston town records and the Suffolk County deeds is the route to a defensible position. The names of the two men acquitted in October 1717 are given in secondary accounts as Thomas Davis and Thomas South, and want checking against the printed Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy, Evans text N01688. The sentences of the special court of admiralty of July 1726, and George Condick's reprieve, want the court's own record together with the Boston News-Letter and the Boston Gazette for the weeks of 4 and 11 July 1726. Boston's reception of pirate goods in the 1690s is asserted in the general literature but thinly evidenced at the level of named transactions; the Colonial Office papers in CO 5 at Kew, particularly Bellomont's Massachusetts correspondence, and the Massachusetts vice admiralty records are the series that would convert assertion into evidence. Population figures for the window are estimates from tax and militia lists, not counts, and no object excavated in Boston has been securely linked to any of the pirate cases in this record.
Bunce Island: Smith's survey establishes the fort, armament, governor's residence and 1720 attack as he found or heard them in 1726. The Company's T 70 papers would settle the island's founding date, its establishment and accounts, Panwell's exact office, the official record of Roberts's attack, and the later transfers and rebuilding. Smith's printed view and plan should be checked against his surviving original drawings.
Cartagena: The 1697 chronology is unsettled at the level of the day: sources place the French appearance on 13 April, the fall of Bocachica on 15 or 16 April and the fall of the city variously through the first week of May, and part of the spread may be calendrical, English records of the 1690s being Old Style against French and Spanish New Style. The Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Santa Fe, with the residencia and judicial papers arising from the loss of the city, and on the French side the Archives nationales fonds Marine series B and the Archives nationales d'outre-mer, are the series that would settle it, together with the fate of governor Diego de los Rios y Quesada, which is not yet established from the primary record. The plunder figures for 1697 are irreducibly partisan, Pointis having a motive to understate the total on which the filibusters' share was reckoned and the filibusters the opposite motive, and only the expedition's own accounts, if they survive in the Marine series, would correct them. Port and decade level figures for enslaved Africans disembarked at Cartagena between 1690 and 1725 have not been extracted and would come from the Slave Voyages estimates interface filtered by principal port of disembarkation; the fate of the South Sea Company factory here during the War of the Quadruple Alliance waits on the Company's memorials calendared in State Papers Domestic, George I, at Kew, including SP 35/10/73, SP 35/12/39, SP 35/13/21 and SP 35/32/38. No documented instance of a named golden age pirate crew operating at or against Cartagena between 1715 and 1726 was found, which is a negative result from limited searching, not a demonstration that none exists; Colonial Office 137, the Jamaica correspondence at Kew, and the Calendar of State Papers Colonial are where such an instance would surface, and the foundation date of the Tribunal of the Holy Office at Cartagena and the building history of the Palace of the Inquisition are not established from any catalogue record.
Cape Coast Castle: Smith's origin story is a report written more than a century after the date he gives and needs checking against the Swedish, Danish, Dutch and English company archives. The 1723 trial print establishes the court at the castle, but the manuscript commission and proceedings in the Admiralty papers would test its OCR and clarify every officer and sentence. The Company's T 70 records would supply establishment lists, accounts and the castle's role in the trafficking and confinement of enslaved Africans.
The Cape of Good Hope: The Dutch side of this place is missing. The Council of Policy at the Cape minuted its decisions as it took them, and those resolutions survive as the C series in the Cape Town archives, transcribed by the TANAP project and converted by GLOBALISE; they would settle which ships the Council let into the road, which it turned away, what the garrison numbered and what a stranger paid for water and refreshment. Dampier's stay is dated here by month alone, because the running date at the head of his Cape chapters is broken in the scan, and his second call, in the Roebuck voyage of 1700 and 1701, survives in clean type and has not yet been worked into the record. Nothing so far found puts a pirate careening, watering or wintering on this coast, and that should be treated as unfinished reading rather than as a finding; the only careening argued over in the sources here is Woodes Rogers's, which his council refused. The Khoi appear only through Dampier's chapter and his Dutch landlord's talk, so the cattle trade, the tobacco price and the Company's monopoly of the dealing all reach the record at second hand and from one side.
Charles Town (Charleston): Governor Johnson's despatch of 21 October 1718, the first report to London of the taking of Stede Bonnet at Cape Fear, and the November letters that followed it are in the South Carolina correspondence at The National Archives. With the proceedings of the court, printed at London in 1719 as The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other Pirates, they alone will settle how many men were condemned in November 1718 and how many were hanged at White Point on the 8th, a number the General History gives as twenty-two, and what became of the company associated with Richard Worley, reported as condemned on 24 November where the province's own letter of 12 December says only that the Governor killed twenty-six men, Worley among them. The number of people living in the town, the strength of its garrison and the state of its fortifications before 1720 are not established here, and would come from the colony's censuses, militia returns and customs records. No document behind this record describes the peninsula the town stood on, or the channel across its bar.
Cape Lopez: Atkins supplies the coast and anchorage, while Ogle's printed journal and the 1723 proceedings supply the pursuit and captures. HMS Swallow's log and Ogle's manuscript reports in the Admiralty papers would fix the damaged lines in the trial print, the precise sequence and casualties, and the disposition of the captured ships. The vivid clothes, last words and burial attached to Roberts come from the General History and remain outside this record unless independently carried.
Execution Dock: Whether Joseph Dawson hanged on 25 November 1696 with the rest of Every's condemned men is unsettled, and the sentence as printed leaves it open. Two printed accounts of the dying words of the men executed with Kidd came from one press in 1701, and which of them is the earlier is undecided. The custom of leaving a body at the low-water mark until three tides had washed over it went out of use on a date given anywhere between about 1786 and 1814. What was done with a body once it was cut down at Wapping is not established.
Gardiners Island: The itemised schedule taken by the Boston committee has not been read; Bellomont's covering letter values the parcel in the round, and the schedule, with weights and descriptions, would be found in the enclosures to CO 5/860 and CO 5/1042 to CO 5/1043 at The National Archives and in the transcripts printed in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, volume 4, until which the circulating totals of 1,110 ounces of gold, 2,353 ounces of silver and 17 ounces of jewels stay unverified. One family account dates a receipt to John Gardiner to 7 July 1699, which sits awkwardly against a delivery reported at Boston on 26 July, and neither the receipt nor Gardiner's own written account has been found in the Gardiner family papers or in CO 5; the wording quoted in the scholarly literature, the damnified muslins and Bengals and the four pieces of Arabian gold, has not been traced to a named document. The grantor and consideration of the 1639 deed are unresolved between Yovawan, Wyandanch and Poggaticut and between ten coats of trading cloth and a black dog with blankets, powder, shot and rum. Whether enslaved people were held on the island in the pirate decades, roughly 1690 to 1725, is undocumented, and would be settled by Suffolk County probate and estate inventories, the Gardiner family papers and the colonial New York censuses of 1698, 1703 and 1723. No period sounding for Cherry Harbour has been found, the text of the 1686 Dongan patent has not been checked against the New York colonial patent enrolments at Albany, and no excavation of the island, whether of the manor house environs or of the Montaukett occupation evidence, has been published.
Havana: The Spanish side of every event is under-represented, the story resting heavily on English colonial correspondence and modern secondary narratives; the Archivo General de Indias sections Santo Domingo, Contratacion and Escribania de Camara, and the Actas Capitulares of the Havana cabildo in the Oficina del Historiador, would settle most of it. The number of ships in the 1715 fleet, the number lost, the death toll, the day the fleets left the bay, the day of the wreck and the value of the cargo differ between accounts or are unfixed; the Contratacion series at Seville, the Spanish salvage accounts and the Jamaican Admiralty papers would settle them. That no pirate company held the town or was sheltered in it rests on evidence of counter-piracy rather than on proof of absence across thirty-five years. The Spanish expedition reported to have sailed against Nassau in 1720 is unverified from the primary record and no strength figures for it are fixed, and the departure port of the force that recaptured Pensacola in August 1719, commonly given as Havana, is unconfirmed from any catalogued source. The width and length of the harbour entrance and the arms of the bay are unfixed: period sailing directions or an Admiralty survey of Havana harbour would supply them. No verified count of enslaved people landed at Havana in any year of 1690 to 1725 has been found, nor catalogue-level confirmation that the South Sea Company kept a factory in the city, and no count of the city's population in this period is fixed. No systematic published underwater survey of Havana bay for this horizon has been traced, and no excavation report for the royal shipyard site; a widely circulated online timeline claiming that French pirates burned Havana in 1692 could not be corroborated. The name of the anchorage before the town stood there, the foundation date and the transfer of the governor's seat from Santiago de Cuba are all unfixed, and the Actas Capitulares and the Santo Domingo series would settle them.
Ile a Vache: The identification of the Isle of Ash in these English papers with modern Ile a Vache is accepted for this draft but needs confirmation from the manuscript chart, French records and period sailing directions. The Jamaica Council minute records a proposed naval response in 1688, not its execution. French colonial correspondence would identify Laurens, the garrison and the length and legal character of the occupation.
Jamaica: The judicial record of 1720 and 1721 is unusually good, because the 1721 Jamaica imprint of the trials survives; almost everything else on this island is provisional. The largest gap is the commission question. No document shows that Governor Nicholas Lawes commissioned Jonathan Barnet, or any other vessel, to take Rackham, and the trial print points the other way. The answer would be in the Colonial Office Jamaica correspondence in CO 137, the entry books of commissions and instructions at Kew, or the Council minutes at the Jamaica Archives and Records Department in Spanish Town. On the volume of the trade in enslaved people at the island the primary record gives only the Council and Assembly's address to James II, which says that some thousands were landed by the Royal African Company in six years; a series would have to be built from the naval officers' shipping lists in CO 142, the Board of Trade returns and the Company's own accounts in T70. There is no figure for sugar output, for the number of estates, or for tonnage entering Kingston or Port Royal, and no census of the island's people. The rising of July 1690 stops where Inchiquin's despatch stops; what became of those who stayed out, and how that rising relates to the later treaties with the Maroon towns, would need the Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica and the Council minutes. The earlier name forms of the island and of its capital, the Taino Xaymaca and the Spanish Santiago and Villa de la Vega, want a document that carries them. No period soundings, bar depths, watering places or provisioning arrangements have been found for any Jamaican anchorage, and no exact date, ship loss or death toll for the hurricanes of 1712, 1722 or 1726. Two identifications remain open: the relation of the print's Plumb Point, Bush Key and Gun Key to the modern Rackham's Cay, and the burial of an Ann Bonny recorded in the St Catherine parish register on 29 December 1733, which is not shown to be the pirate.
Mocha: The depositions taken from Kidd's and Culliford's men would fix the date of the rising in the Company frigate that carried the port's name, where she was lying when it happened, and who killed her commander. The Surat factory's own consultation books would give the year of Captain Hamilton's paper, which is dated by day and month only, and the years in which the escort to Mocha was renewed. No Mughal or Arabic account of the port in these decades has been traced, so the fleets that sailed from here are counted only by the men who wanted to take them. Whether the Moco of the trial witnesses is in every instance the Company's Mocha is unsettled.
Newport: The printer, place and Evans numbers of the 1723 printed Tryals and of Cotton Mather's Useful Remarks could not be confirmed because the Michigan Evans interface refused automated access; a copy in the American Antiquarian Society or the Readex Early American Imprints first series would settle both. The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, for 1696 to 1701 and the Colonial Office papers in CO 5 at Kew have not been consulted, and what they hold on the Rhode Island commissions and the complaints made of them is not yet verified here. The Boston News-Letter reports the Ranger taken with forty-two white men and six Black men, and nothing consulted here shows whether the six were tried, sold or otherwise disposed of; the Rhode Island General Treasurer's Accounts (C#00614), the vice-admiralty records from 1723 and the full printed Tryals are the series that would answer it. No physical trace of the gallows site or of the Goat Island burials has been identified, and whether the intertidal deposit survives at all after two centuries of filling, fortification and marina works is unknown.
New York: The end of Benjamin Fletcher's authority as governor is not yet established from the primary record; the gubernatorial commissions and the New York council minutes, printed in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York volume 4 and calendared in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial, would fix when his term ended and when his successor took up the government. Every money figure in the 1690s New York record derives from accusation, self-defence or promotional report, and the seven hundred and thirteen hundred pounds attached to the Jacob and the fifteen thousand pounds attributed to Burgess's voyages have not been traced to their originating documents in Colonial Office series CO 5 and in the High Court of Admiralty papers HCA 1 and HCA 24. Adam Baldridge's deposition survives and Frederick Philipse's own letters to Baldridge and to his shipmasters do not; anything of that kind would sit among the admiralty exhibits at Kew, in the Colonial Office New York correspondence, or in the Philipse family papers held in New York repositories, none of which has been searched. Two National Archives images catalogued as letters to Kidd dated 4 and 8 June 1698, HCA 1/98 f.209 and HCA 1/98 pt 1 f.128, carry dates that sit awkwardly with the accepted 1699 chronology and have not been read at Kew. New York's part between 1716 and 1726 is thinly documented beyond the Greyhound episode: the printed Minutes of the Common Council, the Admiralty captains' letters in ADM 1 and the New-York Gazette from 1725 would show whether the city took any further part in anti-piracy operations, and no excavated object from the city is yet securely linked to any named pirate, ship or event in this archive.
Ocracoke Inlet: The casualty totals for the action are not verified here from the primary record and should be run to primary sources: Lieutenant Maynard's own report and the related official correspondence in The National Archives at Kew, in the Colonial Office series for Virginia and North Carolina (CO 5) and in the Admiralty papers, would give the earliest figures. The names of the two hired sloops, the Jane and the Ranger, are widely repeated but want confirming against the naval and colonial records rather than later compilations, and the date and record of the Williamsburg admiralty trial, commonly given as 12 March 1719, should be checked the same way against the Virginia colonial court and admiralty records. The status, names and fate of the men of African descent associated with Blackbeard's crew at this date are not established here and would need the Virginia trial records and the Colonial Office and High Court of Admiralty material at Kew. The eighteenth-century channel geometry of the inlet, and any early settlement and pilotage arrangements around it, are not documented in the sources used and would require colonial North Carolina land and shipping records. Throughout, the documented event has to be kept apart from the promotional and traditional overlay in modern Ocracoke heritage material.
The Old Bailey: The names of the commissioners who sat at the Admiralty sessions of 1696 and 1701 have not been established, and would have to come from the commission and session minutes in High Court of Admiralty series HCA 1 at The National Archives, Kew, and from the opening pages of the two printed trial accounts. Whether the printed Proceedings of the Old Bailey ever covered those two sessions is unsettled: the presumption is that they did not, since commercial printers reported them separately, but the point is nowhere stated, and it cannot be tested for May 1701 because no Proceedings survive for that year at all. The sequence of acquittal and retrial in the 1696 Every trials, including the dates of 19 October and 31 October, the acquittal of five with Joseph Dawson's guilty plea, the executions of 25 November 1696 and Dawson's reprieve, is known at second hand and should be read out of the 1696 pamphlet itself or the EEBO-TCP transcription. Whether Robert Culliford was tried at the same May 1701 sessions and successfully pleaded the royal pardon, as popular accounts keep repeating, is unconfirmed. No archival citation has been obtained for the French passes taken out of the Rouparelle and the Quedagh Merchant, which are reported to have surfaced among state papers two centuries after Kidd's trial. William Kidd's close confinement in Newgate Gaol before trial and his examination at the bar of the House of Commons on 27 March 1701 are not verified from the primary record and would have to come out of the Newgate records and the Journals of the House of Commons; the duration of the Piracy Act 1698 and its later continuation have likewise not been read out of the statute book. The venue of John Massey's 1723 trial is genuinely disputed between sources, as is the exact date on which the sessions house was enclosed and refaced in the 1730s; the first should be settled from Joseph Gibbs's article and HCA 1 for 1723, the second from City of London Corporation building records at The London Archives, and the statements about the Royal African Company monopoly, its ending and the South Sea Company asiento of 1713 are general background, not verified against a cited source.
Panama: The 1671 dating is the largest single uncertainty: both 18 and 28 January are current for the battle before the city, and the reported start of the crossing differs by eleven days rather than the ten a straight Julian to Gregorian conversion would give, which only the Spanish testimony in the Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Panama (ES.41091.AGI/15), read against the English narratives and Morgan's own account at Westminster Abbey (WAM 11919, 11926), will settle; the month of Morgan's knighthood, given as January 1674 by one reputable account and November 1674 by another, waits on the Crown Office docket and warrant material at Kew and the London Gazette for late 1674. Portobelo fair economics are the weakest quantitative ground in the file, and no fair value, duration or cargo figure is stated because none could be verified to a catalogue standard; the Contaduria and Contratacion accounting series at Seville would settle it. The volume of the trade in enslaved people through Portobelo specifically is not stated, and would come from the South Sea Company records at The National Archives and the asiento accounts. No careening ground on the isthmus is documented, the plausible candidates at Taboga and the Pearl Islands being recorded only as watering and rendezvous points; Dampier's and Ringrose's journals and the manuscript waggoner at Greenwich (P/32), read for landing and watering places, are the route to an answer. The Rio Chagres wreck containing wooden chests remains unidentified despite press coverage attaching it to Morgan's Satisfaction, and no coordinate is given for the Caledonia site because none could be taken from a catalogue record.
Philadelphia: The single largest gap is the loss of the Golden Age vice-admiralty records for Philadelphia: Jameson reported in 1923 that the earliest surviving volume began in 1735, so there is no docket, examination or sentence for any Pennsylvania piracy suspect of this period and the Provincial Council minutes carry the whole evidential weight. Randolph's and Snead's statement that James Brown married William Markham's daughter rests on two hostile Crown witnesses, the daughter is never named in the calendared correspondence, and the Christ Church registers, the New Castle County records and Markham's probate at the Philadelphia Register of Wills would settle it. The sums Snead reports, 1,000 pounds a man brought in and 100 pounds a man given to Markham, are his own hearsay and are not established figures; the only firm money figure in the episode is the 5 pounds a head reward offered after the gaol escape. Whether Edward Teach was ever in or near Philadelphia is unresolved and probably unresolvable: the warrant of 11 August 1718 rests on an unnamed informant, no arrest followed, and the American Weekly Mercury for July to September 1718 with the Provincial Secretary's papers in Pennsylvania State Archives record group 21 are where the question would be closed. Mervine's 1908 article, the only continuous narrative of Delaware piracy, carries demonstrable errors of date and citation; Mark G. Hanna's Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire has not yet been read in full against this file. No population figure for 1700 or 1720, no count of Every's men who reached Pennsylvania and no vessel-entry figure for the port has been traced to a source.
Providence Island (Providencia): The English colony of 1630 to 1641 is not established from any primary document read here. Lefroy's footnotes to the Bermuda records carry Philip Bell's move from Bermuda to Catalina in 1630 and quote a letter of the Company for Providence Island of 7 February 1634, and nothing else so far read touches the colony at all; CO 124/1 and CO 124/2 at Kew, the Company's own Book of Entries and Journal, are the first place to go for the founding, the governors, the failure of the plantation and the turn to privateering, and neither has been read. The 1641 conquest is known only from Sir Thomas Modyford's assertion of 1666 and his brother officer's memorandum of the same year, both English and both twenty-five years after the event; no Spanish paper has been opened, and the relaciones of the conquest in the Archivo General de Indias at Seville would settle it, though no legajo has yet been identified. The recapture of August 1666 is carried by three accounts that disagree on the garrison (fifty-one, about forty, forty-eight), on the length of the siege and on the Spanish force, and the Spanish side of it is unread. Whether Blodre Morgan's ship sailed for the island in 1671, and what became of the deputy governorship, is unknown. Exquemelin's Bucaniers of America lies behind most later accounts of Mansvelt and of the island, and the library's 1684 and 1695 English printings survive in optical transcriptions too corrupt to quote, so a clean text is needed before his version can be weighed. No documented visit, careening or rendezvous by any named pirate of about 1690 to 1725 has been found at Old Providence, which is a negative result from limited reading rather than proof; the harbour, its soundings and any careening ground are undescribed in everything read so far.
Port Royal: The dead of the earthquake of 1692 have no number here. Supplying one means the accounts printed in London that autumn and the letters sent home from Jamaica that summer, tested against a modern reconstruction of the shock. The town's size and population before 1692 stand open in the same way: no survey, parish register or bill of mortality for Port Royal has been found, and the tavern, building and inhabitant figures in general circulation rest on none of them. The volume of the traffic in enslaved Africans landed at this port, as distinct from Jamaica as a whole, should be quantified from the naval officer's quarterly lists of entries and clearances that Governor Lawes was sending home in 1718 and from the Royal African Company accounts in TNA T70. Whether the thirty-two thirty-six pounders Lawes asked for in December 1719 ever reached Hanover Line is unsettled, and the ordnance surveys of Port Royal of 1 May and 26 July 1718 are known only from the calendar entry that lists them. The naming of Rackham's Cay, which later writers attach to the gibbet at Plumb Point, needs James Knight's manuscript history of Jamaica or an eighteenth-century chart. Any Spanish presence on the point before 1655 is untested against the early Jamaica colonial records. The fire that burned the town before the autumn of 1703, the careening station and the later storms are known only from what the calendared correspondence says in passing.
The Red Sea: The Mughal side is missing entirely. Khafi Khan's chronicle, the one substantial account of the taking of the pilgrim ship from the other deck, has not been obtained, so the violence done aboard is known here only from English witnesses and from the East India Company's servants at Bombay. Two papers the record leans on, John Dann's examination of 3 August 1696 and the abstract of the Company's Bombay letters of 12 October 1695, reach it at second hand; both are printed in Jameson's Illustrative Documents, which should be obtained. The geography is unfixed. No chart or set of period sailing directions lies behind the page, so the width of the strait, the depth and shelter of the anchorage, and whether the Bobs Key of the English witnesses is the Perim of the Company's papers all stand open. What is said here of the island itself, that it commanded the Surat to Mocha trade and had no drinking water, rests on Wright's narrative of 1918, which names no document at those sentences; a period sailing direction or the Company's own account of the place would put it on firmer ground. Who governed Mocha, Jeddah and the Arabian shore between 1690 and 1725 is not established, and would need the Ottoman provincial records and the Company's Mocha factory papers. The Company's factory books for Surat and Bombay at the British Library would give the sailings, the freights and the convoys year by year, and would settle how the monsoon and the pilgrimage season governed them. The taking of the Great Mohammed in 1698, the two Indian ships reported taken by Bowen and Howard in 1703, and the trade that carried enslaved East Africans up this sea are all unresearched. No wreck or landing place of the pirates in this sea has been located, and that absence is a gap in the research rather than proof of a negative.
Ile Sainte-Marie (Nosy Boraha): The island's first decade is not established: Baldridge's years there, his guns and his cargoes wait on his own deposition and the New York correspondence that goes with it, and nothing dates the rising that killed the pirates on the island, which only Kidd's word ties to his slaving to Mascarine. Henry Every's presence here is traditional and wants a named primary source. No period sounding of the harbour has been found, no paper yet gives the numbers of pirates and of enslaved people living in the bay, and the wrecks in it are contested, the Adventure Galley among them, with the manner of her loss unsettled.
Tortuga: The seventeenth-century chronology is not established from any document read here. The loss of 1654 rests on a single memorandum of Under-Secretary Williamson taken down from Major Scott, which gives no month, no force and no terms, and nothing found so far names the governor who fortified the hillside above the anchorage or describes or dates the work he built; the fortification papers of the French colonial archives and the eighteenth-century plans of Basse-Terre held in Paris are the first places to look. The harbour has no period soundings, no bar depth and no documented careening ground, so Exquemelin's seventy guns is the only figure there is. Between about 1700 and 1725 nothing whatever has been found, neither a pirate at the island nor an expedition against one, and the French colonial correspondence for Saint-Domingue and the later volumes of the Calendar of State Papers would show whether that silence is in the papers or in the island's history.
Trepassey: The governing gap is quantitative: the General History's twenty-two vessels, the traditional figure of about 150 fishing boats and the figure of 172 craft given by later writers cannot be reconciled. The contemporary fishery returns and colonial correspondence would settle it, principally TNA CO 194 (Board of Trade, Newfoundland) for 1720, surviving West Country port and customs records, and Admiralty station reports; the same series should be run against the date of about 21 June 1720, which currently rests on secondary datings. That Trepassey stood outside the Atlantic slave trade follows from the surviving descriptions of its labour force, but it has not been checked against planter inventories or servant contracts. No archaeological confirmation of the 1720 destruction has been traced, and the academic literature on piracy in the Newfoundland fishery after the War of the Spanish Succession has not yet been read to a primary standard.
Surat: The record rests almost entirely on Arnold Wright's history of the Surat factory of 1918. Wright quotes the East India Company's Surat and Bombay correspondence at length, but footnotes almost none of it. The Company's own Surat material in the India Office Records at the British Library would test him: the imprisonment of 1695, the release on 27 June, the guarantees demanded in January 1699 and the surrender that followed all stand at present on his unfootnoted narrative. Nothing from the Mughal side has been obtained. Khafi Khan's Muntakhab al-Lubab, the fullest Persian account of the affair, is still to be got, and no Mughal port, customs or revenue document for Surat has been seen, so the administration of the bandar, its annual customs revenue and the honorific names for the port as the gate of Mecca remain untested. What compensation was finally paid for the Gunsway, in what sum and to whom, cannot yet be stated. No dated map or plan of the city or of the Swally road from a named repository has been inspected, so the distance up the river and the depth of the channel are unfixed. Nothing archaeological connects the city to the pirate events: no wreck, no salvaged object, and no located building for the factory in which the Englishmen were held.
Whydah (Ouidah): No name is fixed to the king at Sabbee, nor his accession, nor the length of his reign. The conquest of 1727 is told by the traders it ruined and wants the conquerors' own account of it. What the house or mud fort three miles inland held, and who served in it besides the agent Baldwin, would come from the Royal African Company's factory accounts and agents' letters in series T70 at The National Archives.

Events

Trial of William Kidd: The printed 1701 trial record fixes the six indictments, the guilty verdicts, the presiding judge (Lord Chief Baron Ward) and the two chief Crown witnesses. The French passes absent from this trial survive at The National Archives as CO 5/860, Nos. 64 ii and 64 iii.
Trials of Every's Crew: The insider depositions of John Dann and Philip Middleton (the key eyewitness evidence) are held at The National Archives in HCA 1 and calendared in CSP Colonial; the exact piece references are not yet established.
The Ocracoke Fight: Date, place, Maynard, the death, the beheading and the head on the bowsprit are confirmed from Spotswood's dispatch of 22 December 1718 (CO 5/1318 No.61) and the Boston News-Letter account of February 1719. Casualty totals differ across Maynard, Brand and Spotswood and are held as a range. The Williamsburg crew trial of 12 March 1719 (fourteen executed, Hands pardoned, Odell released) has no surviving primary court record, the largest gap in the case. The specific Boston News-Letter issue carrying the death account is not yet identified; the Maynard and ADM 1 naval originals are not yet confirmed at The National Archives.
The Trials of Rackham's Company: The eleven November executions reconcile Governor Lawes' "Rackum the Pirate and ten more" (28 December 1720): Rackham plus eight of his convicted crew, plus Thomas Brown alias Bourn and John Fenwick, all in November. The court's ordered inspection of the two women has no recorded outcome. The capture that preceded the trial is undated in the print.
The Cape Coast Trial and Executions, 1722: The manuscript proceedings survive in TNA HCA 1/99, a composite piece whose catalogue names only 'Africa, 1722' and does not name Roberts, Ogle or Cape Coast Castle, so the case identity is strong inference rather than a catalogue statement. The readable spine is the 1723 printed account, SRC-004. Per-defendant verdicts for individual attribution remain to be recovered.
The Kidd Privateering Venture Formed (1695): The Articles and the King's grant of pirates' goods are recoverable in full, but only through the appendices to Dalton's The Real Captain Kidd (1911); the enrolled letters patent and the office copies remain uncollated, and Dalton is Kidd's advocate, so his narrative chapters carry a case as well as a text. Those copies would settle the John or William Rowley and Renolls or Reynolds variants, the appendix slip to William Newton, and the date of the grant, where Dalton's own text gives 30 April in the ninth regnal year with a receipt of 27 May 1697 against a secondary literature that generally says 1696. The letter of marque against the French is dated 11 December 1695 by the declaration at HCA 26/3/58; whether it issued from the Admiralty or from Bellomont's procurement is unsettled until the Admiralty registers are read. The two Commons divisions reported against Somers, 167 to 106 and 199 to 131, come from different carriers and stand unreconciled to the Commons Journals. The negotiation behind the Articles is known only from the two Person of Quality letters of 1701, printed to vindicate Bellomont's memory. The Calendar of State Papers Colonial for 1699 and 1700 has not been searched for Bellomont on Kidd; the volume 17 section read holds a Bellomont letter of 18 November 1699 on the Narraganset boundary and several piracy items, but nothing on Kidd.
Kidd Departs England (1696): The largest gap is the muster: no muster book or pay list for the Adventure Galley has been located, so the number pressed at the Nore, the number who crossed the Atlantic and the exact number shipped at New York all stay unfixed. Governor Benjamin Fletcher's report to the Board of Trade about Kidd's recruits is quoted everywhere at second hand, and the sections checked in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial for 1696 and 1697 returned no entry for Kidd or the ship, so the letter has no date or item number yet. The salute anecdote that supposedly provoked the press has no traced contemporary document and the accounts disagree over which vessel went unsaluted, a Navy yacht at Greenwich or the ninety-gun HMS Duchess. The point of joining for individual crew members, William Moore, Robert Bradinham and Joseph Palmer above all, is unestablished and would change the reading of the later mutiny. No condemnation record has been found for the French prize taken on the crossing. Kidd's own narrative and his protest are known at second hand, through Cornelius Neale Dalton's vindication of 1911. Robert Ritchie's 1986 study, the standard scholarly treatment and the work most likely to settle the numbers, has not been read.
The Killing of William Moore (1697): The largest gap is William Moore himself: nothing recovered so far establishes his age, birthplace, family, port of recruitment, term of service, wages or place of burial, and the High Court of Admiralty classes at The National Archives have not been searched for a muster or pay document of the Adventure Galley. The working text of the trial is the 1930 Notable British Trials edition, which modernises spelling and renders parts of the examination as continuous narrative, so every quotation, and the jury names in particular, requires collation against the 1701 print, The Arraignment, Tryal, and Condemnation of Captain William Kidd. The Bellomont correspondence in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial and the Admiralty examinations in HCA 1 have not been searched successfully, so the earliest documentary trace of the killing recovered here is the 1701 indictment itself, a striking silence given that Kidd's own July 1699 Narrative passes over the death entirely. Whether the two Crown witnesses, Joseph Palmer and Robert Bradinham, had been pardoned under the November 1698 proclamation before any question of evidence arose, as Graham Brooks asserts, or in exchange for their testimony, as a popular specialist account has it, is unresolved and decides how much weight the conviction can bear. Three legal questions remain open: whether murder fell outside the 1700 Piracy Act's enumeration, whether Kidd's case was ever cited in the later law of provocation and cooling time, and whether the proclamation of 8 December 1698 excepted Kidd by name alongside Henry Every or alongside three others.
The Capture of the Quedagh Merchant (1698): The largest gap is the original of the Quedagh Merchant's French pass, consulted here only through Ralph D. Paine's 1911 translation and facsimile and through the Calendar of State Papers description of the copy Bellomont forwarded; the two disagree over whether it was dated 14 or 16 January 1698, and the original among the Colonial Office and Board of Trade papers would settle the date and the spellings of Kalender, Cohergy, Quanesse and Jacob. The ownership question is open: the pass points to an Indian owner and Armenian charterers, the Crown told the jury the owners were Armenian, Hugh Parrot deposed that she belonged wholly to the Moors, and the Calendar calls her a Moorish ship; Coji Baba's High Court of Admiralty deposition of 17 July 1701, reported at HCA 24/127, is the obvious next document. No figure for compensation paid, by anyone to anyone, has been verified, and the Mughal and Company reprisal narrative rests on modern secondary writing rather than on any dated Company or Mughal instrument. The custody of the passes between September 1699 and May 1701 is undocumented, so the attribution of their removal to James Vernon, to Shrewsbury or to the Whig junto collectively remains assertion. The forename of Captain Wright, the identity of the French gunner and the names of the roughly ninety Moorish and lascar seamen set ashore are all unrecovered.
Kidd and Culliford at Madagascar (1698): The single largest gap is Culliford's own voice: he was in custody in London, was arraigned, pleaded and was respited, and yet no statement by him about St Mary's appears in the trial text consulted, only one sentence reported at second hand by Joseph Palmer; a deposition or examination in the High Court of Admiralty records would be the most valuable single document for this event. The aid Kidd is said to have given Culliford cannot be quantified: two guns, four guns, an anchor, shirting stuff, money, ammunition and unspecified necessaries are all asserted by different mouths, the presiding judge told the jury the witnesses disagreed, and no inventory, receipt or third-party account exists. The desertion figure will not resolve either, Kidd giving two different numbers within a month and his own men a third and a fourth, and no muster or pay book for the Adventure Galley is cited in the sources consulted. Edward Welch's dealings with the deserters are unevidenced in the primary texts read here, as is the prior acquaintance of Kidd and Culliford in the Blessed William affair of 1690, so the museum should not present the two men as old enemies. Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Harvard, 1986), the standard modern scholarly account, has not been consulted, and anything here that rests on Graham Brooks's 1930 introduction rather than on a document should be tested against it before publication.
Kidd Arrested at Boston (1699): Sarah Kidd is the largest gap: the calendared Bellomont papers place her in the sloop, and a separate Council minute of 31 July 1699 records her New York house left in Dorothy Lee's possession when she went to her husband, but no committal, examination or petition in her name appears anywhere in them, so the assertions that she was arrested, imprisoned and separated from her husband rest on modern biography rather than on the calendared papers; the Massachusetts Council records, the Suffolk County court files for July 1699 to February 1700, and CO 5/860 and CO 5/861 would settle it. The date Kidd reached Boston is unsettled between 1, 2, 3 and 8 July, with the printed Calendar internally at odds with its own enclosures, and the reading of Emott's valuation of the cargo left near Hispaniola, thirty thousand pounds or three hundred thousand, is a textual crux between the Calendar and Paine's transcript; both would be settled by collating the manuscript of Bellomont's letter of 26 July 1699 in CO 5/860 against the 1908 Calendar text. Which two of Sewall, Byfield, Dummer, Hammond and Belcher were the merchants and which the Deputy Collector is nowhere stated, and the three or four men who escaped on 6 July are nowhere named. The sailing date of the Advice from Boston is unsettled: the prisoners were aboard on 16 February 1699/1700 and the treasure on 28 February, while a February and a 10 March departure are both asserted; ADM 51 and ADM 36 would settle it. Robert C. Ritchie's Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (1986), the standard modern treatment, has not been read in full.
The Execution of William Kidd (1701): The two 1701 execution sheets, Paul Lorrain's Ordinary of Newgate's Account and the rival True Account, are quoted throughout from Cornelius Neale Dalton's 1911 transcription, which is extensive but is an advocate's selection; the originals have not been read, that reading is the single highest value next step, and the True Account's bibliographic identity is unestablished. The number of men hanged is genuinely open, two on Lorrain, the Newgate Calendar and Dalton against four in Luttrell's newsletter of 24 May 1701, out of the eight co-defendants Luttrell records as condemned, and only the Admiralty Sessions record with the death warrants or reprieves for Churchill, Howe, Lamley, Jenkins, Loff, Parrot, Barlicorn and Owens will settle it. The apparatus of the killing is anonymous: the Marshal of the Admiralty and his deputy, the hangman and the other divines Lorrain says were present all go unnamed, and the High Court of Admiralty records at Kew, series HCA, would be the place to look. The gibbeting is the weakest link in the standard narrative, with no contemporary order, and no contemporary authority for the tarring, for Tilbury Point or for the three years. Whether any part of the forfeited estate reached Cogi Baba or the owners of the Quedagh Merchant is unsettled. The Greenwich Hospital sum needs an archival check between Lysons's 6472l. 1s. and the Old Royal Naval College's 6,473 pounds 1 shilling, along with the sale accounts and the reason for the four year gap between execution and gift; Kidd's age at death is unsettled between Lorrain's about 56 and a modern 47; and Robert C. Ritchie's Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Harvard, 1986) has not yet been read.
Henry Every and the Ganj-i-Sawai (1695): The figures disagree. One printed trial gives the first prize two tonnages, and its two witnesses put a day and about two days between the two takings. The plunder is counted in pieces of eight and chequins by the indictment, in jewels and a jewelled saddle by the calendared colonial papers, and in rupees by the Governor of Surat, none of them reconcilable. The only day-date given for either taking, 28 September 1695, belongs to the first prize and not to the Gunsway. Khafi Khan's Persian chronicle is known here only at second hand, and the Company's Surat correspondence not at all. Whether the Company paid anything for the loss, and what became of Henry Every, are not established.
The Grounding of the Queen Anne's Revenge (1718): The exact date is given as on or about 10 June 1718 because the accounts say around rather than on, and Ellis Brand's original correspondence in The National Archives (UK), Colonial Office series CO 5 and the Admiralty series ADM, has not been read; it would settle both the dating and the wording of the official account. The full text and precise date of David Herriot's deposition, and of the corroborating deposition of Ignatius Pell, are the crux of the deliberate grounding question and survive to this account only in paraphrase, not in the printed source, The Tryals of Major Stede Bonnet and Other Pirates (London, 1719), or the underlying vice admiralty records. Which officer commanded the sloop Adventure at the inlet is unestablished, and the number of men marooned, reported as roughly seventeen, and the mechanism of their rescue vary between accounts; the Bonnet trial record would settle both. Tonnage of about 200 to 300 tons and gun figures of 16 cannon as La Concorde against some 40 as refitted diverge between sources; the French records of La Concorde's owners and the depositions of her officers Pierre Dosset and Francois Ernaut, held at the Archives departementales de la Loire-Atlantique in Nantes, would settle the original specification. The identification of the Beaufort Inlet wreck remains, strictly, a strong probability resting on circumstantial convergence, and the conservation and artefact reports of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and the QAR Lab bear on any residual doubt.
Woodes Rogers Takes Nassau (1718): The day of the arrival is open. Rogers's own despatch of 31 October 1718 is reported to give 26 July; the manuscript in C.O. 23, with the logs of the Rose and the Milford, would fix each ship's movement, and the printed report from Nassau is broken where it gives the days, the guns of the French prize and the number who heard the commission read. How many men took the pardon is open too: near 300 pirates were on the island in December 1717, five or six hundred are said to have surrendered, four hundred to have been formed into companies. The proceedings enclosed with Rogers's letter of 24 December 1718 would give the court and its sentences.
The Capture of John Rackham (1720): The capture date is unsettled: the 1721 printed Tryals date the act charged to "the 22d Day of October" about one league from Negril Point, later writers index the action under 20 October, and the record of the trials takes the trial print's date as the day the Negril men joined Rackham and follows Governor Nicholas Lawes's contemporary letter towards a capture around 30 October; the exact wording of the pamphlet, the Jamaican Vice-Admiralty minutes and the Colonial Office correspondence at Kew (CO 137 for Jamaica, CO 23 for the Bahamas) would settle it, and none of them has yet been read. The authority under which Jonathan Barnet sailed is likewise unresolved: the trial pamphlet names no commission from Woodes Rogers or from Jamaica, the statement that Rogers hired him rests on later writers alone, and the jurisdiction of the capture and trial was Jamaican under Governor Lawes. The full roster and disposition of the company, the exact list of those hanged, reprieved and acquitted, and the identity of the turtlers or visitors found aboard should be taken from the 1721 Tryals rather than from digests of it. The dramatic account of Bonny and Read keeping the deck while the men sheltered below, and Bonny's reported parting words to Rackham, rest solely on the 1724 General History attributed to Captain Charles Johnson and cannot be corroborated from the trial record; the words quoted for that scene come from a museum's transcription of the General History rather than from the 1724 print. Anne Bonny's fate after her reprieve is undocumented; parish, gaol and manumission records in Jamaica, or South Carolina records, would be needed to test the later traditions.
Roberts Sacks Trepassey (1720): The precise date is not established from any period document: the 1724 General History names no day, and Olaf Uwe Janzen's archival study puts the visit in late June or early July 1720, so the CO 194 Newfoundland correspondence and the Admiralty logs for the 1720 season would be needed to fix it. The number of vessels present and destroyed is the principal contested point, running from two and twenty in the 1724 print, through the 26 ships Lieutenant Governor Gledhill of Placentia reported burnt to the Board of Trade, down to effectively one in the only eyewitness statement, the deposition of Moses Renos; TNA CO 194/6, including the folio cited for Gledhill, and the deposition itself would settle the range. The name of the sloop Roberts brought into the harbour is not established, since the primary passage does not name her and secondary works call her the Fortune, probably by confusion with the French prize taken afterwards; contemporary depositions or prize records would clarify it. The 1724 General History is the only connected narrative of the episode and is used throughout as a source that embellishes.
The Wreck of the Whydah Gally (1717): Where she came ashore is not agreed. The despatch from Bermuda puts her at Nossetts Bay to the southward of the Cape, Wellfleet is named only by later writers, and the printed Boston trial of the eight men with Cyprian Southack's own salvage letters would settle it. The numbers do not agree either: a hundred and twenty aboard with two saved, a hundred and forty-two lost with Bellamy, a hundred and forty-four drowned. Southack's letters and his journal of the work would give his burial totals. What the pirates had aboard in money, and how much of it went into the sand or into the houses of the Cape, is reckoned nowhere in the papers that reached London.
The Act of Grace, the King's Pardon (1717 to 1718): Both proclamations survive in transcription from The London Gazette, issues 5573 and 5706; what is missing is the arithmetic and the court record. Pearse's surrender list of February 1718, reported at about 209 names, has not been read at the manuscript in ADM 1/2282, and the numbers pardoned by Woodes Rogers from late July 1718 run from about two hundred to five hundred across the accounts; Pearse's and Rogers's own reports and the Bahamas correspondence in CO 23 would settle both. The record of the December 1718 trial and executions at Nassau has not been read. Rogers's arrival at Nassau is given as 24, 25 or 26 July 1718 across secondary sources, and his own despatch gives 26 July. John Rackham's standing during the pardon window is thinly covered, and the printed proceedings of the 1721 Jamaica trial would test it.
The Battle of Cape Lopez (1722): The trial arithmetic that followed the action, meaning the numbers captured, tried, hanged, acquitted, indentured, sent to the Marshalsea and sold into slavery, is not established here from the primary record beyond what the Archive's own record of the Cape Coast trial takes from the tables of the 1723 printed account; the printed and manuscript proceedings of the 1722 Cape Coast Castle court, read against High Court of Admiralty and Colonial Office papers at The National Archives, Kew, and the Royal African Company records in Treasury T70, would settle the remainder. The exact armament of the Royal Fortune and of HMS Swallow, and whether the prize taken shortly before the battle was the Neptune, rest largely on the 1724 General History of the Pyrates and want Admiralty series and captains' log evidence. The precise form of Chaloner Ogle's honour, reported as a knighthood in 1723, and any later association with the Order of the Bath revived in 1725, has no documentary basis yet in evidence here and is carried as an open item rather than as fact. Much of the narrative colour of the action, including Roberts's finery, the drunkenness of his crew and the penny-sized piece of grapeshot, descends from the 1724 General History, a source that embellishes and whose authorship is itself disputed, and is attributed to it by name on the page. The sending out of the two fourth rates to the Guinea coast, and the sickness among their companies that left the Swallow hunting alone, are not verified here from the primary record; the Admiralty papers and Ogle's own despatches would settle them. The action of 5 February 1722, in which the Ranger was drawn out and taken, is likewise not verified here and should be written from Ogle's own dispatch as printed in the London Gazette and reprinted in the 1723 trial account, which also identifies her as the French ship taken out of Whydah road; the fate of the Little Ranger remains unsettled.
Blackbeard's Blockade of Charles Town (1718): The exact days are unfixed: the month and a duration of about five or six days are secure, but the days themselves are not established, and the Colonial Office correspondence of Governor Robert Johnson and the colony's agents in the CO 5 (South Carolina) series at The National Archives, Kew, together with the Boston News-Letter for June and July 1718, has not been consulted. The count of eight or nine vessels stopped derives from the 1724 General History and is repeated downstream; Charles Town shipping and customs records and the same CO 5 correspondence would test it independently. Samuel Wragg's capture is not verified from the primary record, and neither is the wider hostage list, nor above all the small son attributed to Wragg, sometimes called William and sometimes aged about four; the South Carolina Council journals and Wragg family papers would settle them. Reports of the ransom diverge between a monetary value of 300 to 400 pounds sterling and a physical quantity of 400 pounds weight of medicine, a distinction only the primary correspondence can resolve. The vivid Marks episode, with its delayed delivery, drunken escort and threatened captives, rests almost entirely on the General History, a source known to embellish, and the 2015 recovery of medical instruments from the Queen Anne's Revenge wreck is evidence of shipboard medicine generally rather than of the Charles Town demand itself.
The Trial and Hanging of Stede Bonnet (1718): The 1719 printed Tryals has not been read page by page, so the exact number of Bonnet's crew hanged on 8 November 1718 and the disposition of every named prisoner as executed, acquitted or reprieved remain approximate; the print itself and any surviving manuscript journal of the South Carolina Court of Vice-Admiralty would settle them. The internal trial dates, Bonnet's arraignment at about 10 November and his sentence at about 12 November, likewise need the pagination of the print and the death warrants issued to the provost marshal. Casualty figures for the Cape Fear action diverge between accounts and remain a range pending a contemporary report from Rhett himself or the South Carolina correspondence in the Colonial Office papers, TNA CO 5. Bonnet's life before 1717 and any documented motive for turning pirate rest partly on the 1724 A General History of the Pyrates and would need the Barbados land and militia records to separate record from tradition.
Roberts and the Bahia Treasure Fleet (1719): The exact day and month in 1719 are not fixed in the primary record; the September dating is a later reconstruction, and Portuguese colonial records would settle it. The name of the ship Roberts himself commanded at Bahia is not established from the primary record either. The identity of the prize, commonly called the Sagrada Familia in later writing but unnamed in the 1724 General History, her true complement (about 150 men in the primary text against 170 in later accounts), and the sterling value of 40,000 moidores plus goods all await documentary confirmation; what that gold was worth in sterling is nowhere stated. The archives that would resolve these points are the Arquivo Historico Ultramarino in Lisbon and the correspondence of the Governor of Bahia for 1719, for the Portuguese loss report and cargo manifest; British records for Roberts's company generally sit in The National Archives series HCA (High Court of Admiralty) and CO (Colonial Office), though these bear more on his later Atlantic and West African career than on Bahia. No independent Portuguese archival confirmation has yet been read, and the 1724 General History, which supplies the fleet count, the seventy-gun escorts, the forty guns, the moidores, the diamond cross and the chase, dramatises and rounds its figures.
The Wreck of the 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet: No Spanish archive was consulted at first hand, so every ship-by-ship cargo and casualty figure reaches this record through modern intermediaries; the lading registers, salvage accounts and Admiral Salmon's despatches in the Archivo General de Indias at Seville would settle both the death toll, which is variously given at over 600, at more than a thousand and at about 1,500, and the registered treasure, which is variously given as about 7,000,000 pesos and as more than 14,000,000. All primary quotation here comes from the printed Calendar of State Papers Colonial, which mixes verbatim wording with editorial summary, and needs collation against C.O. 137/11 Nos. 16, 16 i. to xv. and C.O. 137/12 Nos. 21, 21 i. to iv. at The National Archives. The date of the raid, the size of the landing party and the pairing of Henry Jennings with the Barsheba all rest on modern reconstruction rather than on the calendared depositions, which name the sloops and the captains in separate documents and never join them; a muster roll, a prize condemnation, or the Joseph Lorraine deposition of 21 August 1716 in the Jamaica Council Minutes would be the natural place to look. Admiral Salmon's command of the salvage camp likewise comes from later writers and not from the calendared Spanish complaint. The circulating plunder figures in coin and in sterling do not reconcile at the conversion rate the secondary literature itself uses, and tracing the sterling figures to their earliest appearances would probably show where the error entered. What became of Hamilton's case in London remains unsettled, and his defence papers with the Privy Council proceedings of 1716 to 1717 would settle it.
Hornigold Voted Out (1716): The date is the largest gap: nothing contemporary dates the division, and the window can be closed only from outside, by John Brown's rough intervals and by Abijah Savage's Bonetta deposition of 9 November 1716. A dated document naming Hornigold and Bellamy in company, or naming Bellamy in independent command, between June and October 1716 would settle it. The mechanism is thinner than the popular account allows, since one phrase, chosen by a great Majority, carries the whole weight of the vote while Peter Cornelius Hoof describes only a parting. Brown's figure for the company Bellamy kept is illegible in the Text Creation Partnership transcription of the 1718 Boston printing and needs collation against an original or against Baer's edition. The archival reference for Savage's deposition is unsettled, cited in the literature as CO 157/11 when Leeward Islands correspondence of the period normally sits in CO 152, and the New York Vice-Admiralty examinations of Jeremiah Higgins and Richard Caverley have been used only at second hand. Whether Edward Thache was present at the division, and on which side, is unresolved and may be unresolvable, and no word of Hornigold's or Bellamy's own survives for the event.
Anstis Splits from Roberts (1721): The originals behind the calendar have not been inspected: reading C.O. 323/8, Nos. 32 and 32.i at The National Archives would settle whether the General History's printed text of the petition is a faithful transcript, whether the signatures form one circle or two, and how many men signed, a name count being a direct test of the seventy hands the brigantine is said to have carried away. The number of men who left with Anstis is otherwise unresolved, since only the General History gives a figure and the competing hundred appears to be a migration from the complement later put aboard the Morning Star. The place of the split rests on a single sentence in a single chapter and nothing independent corroborates the 400 leagues. Command of the two vessels after the Morning Star was taken is genuinely contested between the General History, Philip Gosse's Pirates' Who's Who and Governor Hart's trial-derived statement that John Fenn had commanded the Good Fortune for three years, and the Antigua trial record, if it survives in C.O. 152/14 or in Admiralty papers, has not been read. The date and circumstances of Anstis's own death are established by no document read, Hart's despatch of 8 June 1723 still reporting the brigantine at large with twelve men aboard, and all quotations from the General History are taken from a modernised-spelling transcription rather than the 1724 sheets.
The Mutiny and Execution of William Fly (1726): The attribution of the gallows warning against masters' barbarity is the largest unresolved point: Colman assigns it to Cole and Greenvill, while the Boston report of 16 July 1726 and Cotton Mather assign it to Fly, and the report was read here only through Abel Boyer's London reprint in an uncorrected optical transcription, so the Boston Gazette, New-England Courant and Boston News-Letter files for 7 to 21 July 1726 need reading directly. The snow's surgeon cannot be named, the printed trial calling him Richard Ruth and its own errata slip substituting a Mr Roan who is elsewhere a passenger; a Bristol muster or crew list would settle it. Whether the Elizabeth was a slaving vessel is not established by any document consulted, the inference resting on Bristol ownership and a Guinea destination, and the Bristol Presentments and Society of Merchant Venturers records are the place to test it. The six pirates who escaped in the prize schooner James with George Tasker on 23 June 1726 disappear from the record, and George Condick's fate after his reprieve, together with the disposal of the piratical goods and of the snow herself, would need the Privy Council registers, the Colonial Office entry books for 1727 and the Massachusetts Vice-Admiralty records. The device on Fly's black flag is nowhere described, so any reconstruction shown in the gallery must be labelled conjecture.
The Voyage of the Batchelor's Delight (1683 to 1691): The largest gap is the ship herself: no calendared colonial paper names her, the name rests on Wafer's book and the later literature, and her nationality, force, tonnage and fate are all contested between Cowley's new ship of 40 guns, the Danish vessel of thirty-six guns given by Gray and the Dictionary of National Biography, the Dutch ship of thirty-six guns in Richard Arnold's examination of 1686, and the Charlotte Amalia of Gluckstadt named by a modern popular account. The Danish West India and Guinea Company's records, the Brandenburg papers for Gross Friedrichsburg, and the Pennsylvania admiralty and Philadelphia port records for May and June 1688 would settle it. Peter Cloise, the black man who sailed with the company and whose testimony was used against its officers, survives only as the fact of his examinations of 26 June and 16 August 1688; his origin, status and fate are unknown, and the originals in the Colonial Papers with the Virginia county records for 1688 to 1692 are what would answer them. The date of Cook's death is unresolved between Dampier, Gray and Cowley, as is the exact date of the seizure in the Chesapeake, where the widely repeated 22 June 1688 comes from later writers against a calendared examination of 26 June. The continuity between the pardon this company claimed in 1690 and the Act of Grace of 1717 is an argument from the shape of the policy, and no document states it. The quotations from Wafer and Cowley are taken from optical transcriptions of early printings and want collation against the originals, and matter drawn from the Calendar of State Papers Colonial is the calendar editor's abstract rather than the manuscript's own wording.
Morgan's Sack of Panama (1671): The cause of the fire is open and the document most likely to settle it has not been read: the account by Don Juan Perez de Guzman, President of Panama, intercepted at sea by a French man of war and translated in Jamaica, which W. Noel Sainsbury calendars in a single line of description as a four page manuscript at Col. Papers, Vol. XXVI., No. 70; the Spanish original among the Panama papers in the Archivo General de Indias would serve as well. No excavation report on the 1671 burn layer at Panama Viejo, dug by the Patronato since 1995, was consulted, and that archaeology is the likeliest source of independent evidence on the fire's origin, extent and direction. No text of Morgan's relation was read in manuscript: all primary quotation passes through Sainsbury's calendar of 1889, in which only matter inside quotation marks is verbatim and the editor silently modernises rank and style. The name of Morgan's flagship, wrecked on the bar at Chagres, the exact date of the storm of Chagres, the date of Morgan's arrival back at Port Royal and the date of his knighthood are all unfixed; the London Gazette and the Docquet books, Jamaica port records and Lynch's early correspondence are the places to look. Peter Earle's monograph The Sack of Panama, the standard modern treatment, was not read.
The Treaty of Ryswick (1697): The causation question is unresolved, and two readings stand against each other: Cecil Headlam's demobilisation thesis in the 1908 calendar preface and J. W. Fortescue's market and complicity thesis in the 1905 volume. Both rest on editorial prefaces of 1905 and 1908 rather than on monographs, and Rediker's Villains of All Nations and Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, Robert C. Ritchie's Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates, J. S. Bromley's Corsairs and Navies 1660 to 1760, Mark G. Hanna's Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire and Arne Bialuschewski's work on colonial markets would allow the argument to be settled rather than balanced. The treaty texts used are an English translation printed in London in 1698 and carry optical recognition damage affecting at least the first of the Imperial plenipotentiaries, printed variously as Kaunitz, Caunitz and Catinitz, and some numerals; the French and Latin originals, Jean Dumont's Corps universel diplomatique and the Consolidated Treaty Series have not been collated against them, and dating style needs care throughout, the Anglo-French treaty being dated 10 September Old Style and 20 September New Style in the same 1698 volume and William III's ratification at Loo of 25 September 1697 not yet assigned a style with confidence. The closing dates of the prize windows are computed from the signature dates; the treaty gives the intervals, not the days. Whether the treaty ceded western Hispaniola and Tortuga to France or merely acquiesced by deliberate omission needs a dedicated check against the Spanish text and the Spanish diplomatic instructions of 1697, since the legal birth of Saint-Domingue turns on it. No quantitative series has been established: not the number of privateering commissions revoked, not naval or merchant muster figures for 1697 and 1698, not the number of vessels recorded as turning pirate in 1698 and 1699, all of which would come from the Admiralty records in The National Archives series HCA and the letters of marque declarations.
The War of the Spanish Succession Begins (1700 to 1702): The Minutes of Council of Jamaica of 11 July 1702, calendared as enclosure 743.i, have not yet been read; they would name the eight sloops fitted at Port Royal and their commanders, and would show the exact form of commission and bond, which is what would allow a later pirate's name to be tested against a commission list of July 1702. No verified total of English letters of marque issued between 1702 and 1713 has been obtained, and the declarations and bonds in The National Archives series HCA 25 and HCA 26 would supply both the number and the named masters and vessels. The text of the English declaration of war of 4 May 1702 has not been consulted; the London Gazette for early May 1702 would settle the wording proclaimed at Boston, Portsmouth and Port Royal. Beckford's despatch is calendared under 10 July 1702 but refers internally to the 11th and the 15th, and the original at C.O. 137, 5, No. 72 would resolve whether the heading is a date of commencement or a calendaring error. The year of the French asiento grant remains open: no text of the French contract, and no record of the award of it, has been read for this record. No record of any kind has been found placing Benjamin Hornigold in wartime service.
The Treaty of Utrecht (1713): The treaty texts are the largest gap: no archival reference for any Utrecht instrument has been verified, and the Anglo-Spanish peace, read so far only from an online transcription with no stated edition, translator or date, is not described on this page at all. The ratifications in The National Archives at Kew, the texts in the Consolidated Treaty Series and the eighteenth-century printed collections of treaties should therefore be read before any article is quoted on a label, the Anglo-Spanish peace first. The Asiento is the second gap: the contract itself has been read in the printed English translation of 1713, with its signature date of 26 March 1713 at Madrid, but nothing about the trade actually carried on under it is verified from the primary record, so the South Sea Company records are the next step. The third gap is quantitative, since no naval or privateering manpower figure could be verified and none is asserted here; the Admiralty musters, the naval estimates for 1711 to 1716 and the privateering commission papers in the High Court of Admiralty series are the next place to look. The fourth is causal, since the file cannot isolate demobilisation from the ungoverned Bahamas, the plate fleet wrecks and the Spanish coastal seizures, and a merchant seamen's wage series with a prosopography of the named Nassau men would sharpen it, while Philip V's renunciation date, the date and losses of the plate fleet wreck, the participants and amount of the December raid on the salvage camps, and the plenipotentiaries who signed at Utrecht all remain unsettled.
The Final Anti-Piracy Campaigns (1726 to 1728): The terminal date is an editorial construct rather than a fact, and an attribution to Arne Bialuschewski of an argument for a 1726 terminus could not be verified; his catalogued survey is bracketed 1695 to 1725 and its full text was not obtained. The circulating figures for the scale of the age, about 400 to 600 pirates executed between 1716 and 1726 and something under four thousand men in eighty vessels, were not checked against Marcus Rediker's own pages and should be presented as estimates with named authorship. How much sporadic piracy continued in 1727 and 1728 is not established: the Colonial State Papers for 1728 to 1729 show the subject nearly absent, but that is an argument from silence in a series that calendars selectively, and only a systematic sweep of the Admiralty in-letters and the colonial newspapers for 1727 to 1730 would settle it. The fates of the residual captains remain open, George Lowther's death year unfixed between two contradictory London reports of 1724, and Edward Low's end and the last trace of Francis Spriggs are not yet verified from any period document, while the Cape Coast Castle disposal figures account for only 156 of the 272 people taken with Roberts. The three 1726 Boston imprints were consulted through a modern public-domain edition carrying Text Creation Partnership keyings whose OCR is imperfect, so no quotation should be reset in gallery text without collation against the Evans microform.

Institutions

The Board of Admiralty: The identity of the First Lord of the Admiralty across the peak anti-piracy years of about 1716 to 1725 is not established from the sources read here and should be confirmed from Sainty's office-holders list in full or from the commission patents. The naval strength figures for American waters, about thirteen ships in 1716, sixteen in 1718 and fourteen in 1720, and the estimate of fifteen hundred to two thousand pirates, come from a single modern synthesis and are approximate. The date and terms of the first commission putting the office of Lord High Admiral in commission, and the number of Commissioners named in it, are not established from the primary record and have still to be read against the letters patent. How far naval officers sat as members of colonial vice-admiralty piracy commissions, rather than merely supplying captures and evidence, is unsettled. The Admiralty series at Kew, ADM 1 in-letters, ADM 2 out-letters and orders, ADM 3 Board minutes, ADM 51 captains' logs and the courts-martial papers, with HCA and CO for the trials and vice-admiralty commissions, would settle all of these.
The Board of Trade: The Board's own share in drafting the Act for the more effectual Suppression of Piracy, 11 Will. 3 c. 7, and the anti-piracy clauses of individual governors' instructions is unsettled; its entry books, out-letters and representations in CO 389, its minutes and journals in CO 391, and the Privy Council registers in PC 2 would fix it. The number and identity of the great officers who sat ex officio changed over time and is known only approximately, and the office-holder series in British History Online and CO 324 would pin it down. Which golden-age pirates appear in which Board paper has still to be traced item by item in the Calendar of State Papers Colonial and in CO 5, America and West Indies, original correspondence. The Board's advice and the action of the Admiralty and the High Court of Admiralty ran in separate offices, and how the two met would take HCA 1 for the piracy trials and the ADM series for naval deployment.
The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa: The scan-backed Act now settles the Company's statutory form, but section III made the transfer of the Royal African Company's property conditional on a further divesting Act. That enactment and the T 70 records are still needed for the actual transfer date and inventory. The committee's minutes and annual accounts would show how the statutory rules worked, what Parliament supplied, and when and how the institution ended.
The East India Company: The value of Every's plunder is not established, and no figure for it can be given. The course of the Surat detentions, the names of those arrested, the dates of imprisonment and release, and the formal terms of the security the Company gave for Mughal shipping are not established, and want the East India Company records in the British Library India Office Records, the Colonial and State Papers at Kew and the Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies, with the Privy Council registers. The exact wording, dates and amounts of the Crown and Company rewards for Every, and the sequence of proclamations across the three kingdoms, are not fixed: the London Gazette, the Privy Council registers in PC 2 and the printed proclamations have not been set against the Scottish proclamation of 1696. The London trial records, indictments, charges, verdicts and sentences have not been checked in the High Court of Admiralty series or against the printed trial accounts of 1696. The dating of the rival company's enabling statute, commonly given as 1698, and of the union of 1708 to 1709 has not been pinned to the statute book or the tripartite indenture, and whether English private traders or colonial officials colluded with the Red Sea pirates remains contested.
The Colonial Governor: Whether Spotswood's expedition into North Carolina waters was lawful is an open question: his own justifications and the Board of Trade's reaction sit in TNA CO 5 (Virginia) and the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, and have not been consulted. The exact date of Rackham's capture in 1720 has not been established, and would be settled by the Jamaican vice-admiralty records and Governor Lawes's dispatches in TNA CO 137 together with the printed Tryals of 1721. The membership and quorum rules of individual colonial Councils are not set out on this page, and would be clarified by the royal Instructions in the CO series and by the colonial Council journals.
The High Court of Admiralty: The succession of judges of the High Court of Admiralty across 1690 to 1725 is unsettled, and Sir Charles Hedges, in office in the 1690s, is the only one named; the patent rolls would give the full list. The exact membership of individual piracy commissions of oyer and terminer is likewise open, and would come from the oyer and terminer records and criminal papers in the HCA series at The National Archives, Kew, from the Privy Council registers for the commissions themselves, and from Colonial Office papers and the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial for the colonial vice-admiralty trials after 1700. The dating of the Piracy Act 1698 as both an Act of 1698 and an Act of 1700 is a feature of the parliamentary session, which was styled 1698 to 1699; the day of royal assent and the day on which the session opened are still to be fixed from the Journals of the House of Lords.
The Privy Council and the Secretaries of State: The Privy Council's own entry books in PC 2 at The National Archives carry the text of every order, the attendance and the committee work, and the State Papers carry the Secretaries' outgoing letters. Between them they would establish who sat, how the Northern and Southern Departments divided the colonies, and which Secretary held which business in which year; none of that is settled here. The two pardon proclamations rest on the London Gazette prints. The December 1718 issue is so damaged in the scan that only the surrender date and the offices named in it can be made out, and its wording needs to be settled against a clean copy or against the Privy Council papers. Whether a piracy ever came before the Council as a formal appeal, rather than as executive direction, would need a search of PC 2; the appeals committee is found here removing a councillor from Bermuda, not judging a pirate.
Newgate, the Marshalsea and Admiralty Execution: Nothing on this record comes from the gaols' own papers. The commitment and discharge books of Newgate and of the Marshalsea would show who was received, on whose warrant, how long each man waited and who left alive, and would settle whether the Admiralty kept any separate accommodation in either prison, which no document behind this record establishes. The High Court of Admiralty series at Kew holds the session papers and the commissions for the sessions of 1696 and 1701, and would name the commissioners who sat, which the printed trials give only in part. The Act of 1698 required every commissioned court overseas to send its minutes and the copies of its articles and judgments home to that court, so whether the colonial courts complied can be tested there. What became of the seventeen men referred from Cape Coast Castle to the Marshalsea in 1722 is unsettled: the printed proceedings of 1723 and the Admiralty file would show how many survived the passage and what was done with them. The procession from Newgate to Wapping behind a silver oar reaches this record only through a modern author's quotation of a printed sheet of 1701, and the sheet itself would settle both the practice and how old it was. What was done with a body once it was cut down at Wapping is not established by any document behind this record.
The Royal African Company: None of the Company's own books have been read. The African Companies records, T 70, at The National Archives hold the establishment lists, the instructions sent to the agents and the accounts, and they would fix who held which office on the coast at a given date, what the castles cost to keep, and how many people the Company shipped and where they were landed. The figures are John Atkins's, printed in London in 1735 and had by him at second hand. The Company's foundation and the wording of its charter rest on no document yet read, so the London constitution, the Governor, Sub-Governor, Deputy Governor and Court of Assistants, comes from a research note; Atkins found the chief officer at Cape Corso styled Director General, which the note does not. The branding of enslaved people with the mark D. Y. is attested at Cape Corso Castle by an eyewitness, but no instruction or account of the Company's own supports it, and whether it was ordered from London is open. When and how the settlement of 1698 ended is unsettled: the Act was to run thirteen years, and the statutes that followed it would say what replaced it. Atkins's statement that the duties were diverted from the forts stands directly against the appropriating clause of the Act, and the yearly accounts rendered to the Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer would decide between them. For 1722 the printed proceedings of 1723, the High Court of Admiralty file and the Colonial Office papers would show what became of the twenty condemned men indentured to the Company for seven years' servitude in Africa.
The Royal Navy: The prisoner, hanging and commutation figures for Bartholomew Roberts's crew are contested between the museum account and the printed record of the trial and should be settled from the proceedings of the Court of Admiralty held at Cape Coast Castle in 1722, with the printed account often bound with the trials, alongside the High Court of Admiralty and Colonial Office series at Kew. The actual deployment of station ships and convoy escorts in the West Indies and North America during the piracy years is thinly covered in the popular literature and would be established from Admiralty records, including captains' logs and sailing orders, and from the Calendar of State Papers Colonial. The date of Chaloner Ogle's appointment to command HMS Swallow is not established, and would be settled from commission and appointment records. The characterisation of the Navy as simultaneously suppressing piracy and shielding the Atlantic slave trade is an interpretation associated with Marcus Rediker and other modern historians; it is well grounded but remains historiographical argument, testable against Royal African Company records and Admiralty cruise records.
The South Sea Company: The establishing statute is commonly cited as the South Sea Company Act 1711, 9 Ann. c. 21; that citation is reported rather than confirmed, and wants the Statutes of the Realm and the parliamentary record. The royal charter of 10 September 1711 has not yet been checked against the Privy Council registers, PC 2. Whether any named South Sea Company ship was taken by a named golden-age pirate is not established: this would be settled by the High Court of Admiralty prize and piracy papers at The National Archives, HCA 1 and HCA 32, and by the company's own captains' and factors' correspondence. The slave-trade totals, on the order of 34,000 people embarked across some 96 voyages with perhaps 30,000 surviving the crossing, are secondary estimates and want checking against the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and the monograph literature. Diplomatic and commercial detail on the Asiento and the annual ship lies in the State Papers, the Calendar of State Papers Colonial (America and West Indies), CO 5 and the Board of Trade papers. The company's internal governance and finances survive in its own archive, held in part in the British Library Additional Manuscripts and at The National Archives, which has not been consulted directly.
The Colonial Vice-Admiralty Courts: The chain of renewals of the Act for the more effectual suppression of piracy between 1706 and 1719, and whether it was made perpetual by 6 George I chapter 19, is unsettled; it would be resolved statute by statute in the Statutes of the Realm, against the Journals of the House of Commons. The regnal citation of the Act varies between 11 William III chapter 7 and 11 and 12 William III chapter 7 because the parliamentary session straddled regnal years; the Statutes of the Realm printing and British History Online resolve it. The distinction between the standing vice-admiralty court and the ad hoc piracy commission, and the overlap of their personnel colony by colony, would be settled by the original commissions and court records: the High Court of Admiralty series at The National Archives, especially HCA 1 for oyer and terminer and piracy, the colonial vice-admiralty court records, the Colonial Office series and the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, America and West Indies, the Admiralty series for naval officers such as Ogle and Herdman, and the Privy Council registers for commissions and pardons. The numbers hanged, gibbeted, acquitted and sentenced to servitude at Charles Town and at Cape Coast Castle have not been counted from the printed Tryals and the trial minutes themselves.
The House of Commons: Whether the House examined William Kidd at the bar, and on what day, is not settled: volume 13 of the Journals of the House of Commons, covering 1699 to 1702, is absent from the online series that carries volumes 1 to 12, so the sittings of late March and early April 1701 have not been consulted, and the order for Kidd to appear would be found there. The April 1701 impeachment resolutions are dated 14 April in the printed proceedings and 15 April by the History of Parliament, which also supplies a division of 189 to 182; the Journal would settle which is the sitting day. The unanimous acquittal of Orford on 23 June 1701 is reported as before 43 peers in the main text of one biography, which elsewhere quotes Vernon giving 44. No merchant petition complaining specifically of piracy losses has been found in the printed proceedings for 1699 to 1700, 1720 to 1721 or 1721 to 1722, and those proceedings do not record the passage of the 1721 piracy bill at all, so the bill's parliamentary origin and the members who carried it remain open. The royal assent dates of the two piracy Acts would come from the Journals of the House of Lords, which have not been consulted; neither has the Transportation Act 1717, 4 Geo. I c. 11, section VII, in the Statutes of the Realm, nor the Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates of 5 September 1717 in the London Gazette. Whether 6 Geo. I c. 19 perpetuated the piracy statute is likewise open, the text of that Act not having been consulted, and whether an organised mercantile interest sat inside the House would need member-level work in the History of Parliament volumes against the division lists.
The French East India Company: The issuer of the Quedagh Merchant's French pass is not settled: one account attributes it to Francois Martin as the Company's representative, another to French authorities at Pondicherry, which is difficult to sustain against the Dutch occupation of that place from September 1693 to September 1699, and what would settle it is the pass itself in CO 5/860 at The National Archives, Kew, read against the Company's Surat and Bengal correspondence in the Archives nationales d'outre-mer, neither of which has been consulted directly. The date on which the passes were rediscovered is carried as 1910 on the Archive's record of the passes, 1911 being the year of Paine's facsimile; it rests on secondary assertion. The day of the taking of the Nossa Senhora do Cabo in the roads of Saint-Denis is given as 8, 20 and 26 April 1721 in three separate traditions, and Portuguese and Bourbon council records would settle it. Whether the Bourbon amnesty rested on a royal instrument, a Company instruction or the local council's own authority is not established, and wants the records of the Conseil superieur and the Company's instructions to its Mascarene governors. No French Company ship is identified in the sources consulted as having been taken by pirates in this period, and the Lorient armament records would test that silence.
The Mughal Imperial Administration: The name of the governor of Surat who imprisoned the English factors in 1695 is unresolved between I'timad Khan, Ahmanat Khan and Amanat Khan; the East India Company's Surat factory records and consultations for 1695 and 1696 in the India Office Records, set against the Mirat-i-Ahmadi of Ali Muhammad Khan, would settle it, and neither has been consulted. The date of 6 January 1696 for Samuel Annesley's convoy bond, and the terms of that bond, rest on a single popular secondary account. Whether the obligation to convoy was ever reduced to a written imperial instrument, a farman or hasb-ul-hukm, rather than left as a local undertaking by the Surat council, is not established. The sums are also unsettled: the figure of about 600,000 rupees for the compensation exacted after 1695 is not verified from the primary papers, while the sterling figures circulating in the piracy literature are not reconciled with it and may measure the Company's losses, its insurance claim and the Mughal demand rather than one thing. Tyler Kynn's 2021 article on the Mughal captain's letter, the leading modern treatment from the imperial side, has been read only in abstract, and Ashin Das Gupta's monograph on the decline of Surat has not been consulted; Yakut Khan's mansab, formal style and the terms on which the Sidi fleet served remain unestablished.
The Customs Service: No office-holder list for the commissioners of the Board of Customs between 1690 and 1725 has been located, so the commissioners named are not yet fixed from a departmental roll, and the size and composition of the Board after the original six commissioners of 1671 is unsettled. Jahleel Brenton's commission dates as collector for New England are unfixed, and the identification of the calendar's Brookes, collector at New York, with Chidley Brooke is probable on office and date but unproved. The succession to the colonial surveyor generalship is unsettled: one account has Robert Quary succeed Edward Randolph in 1702, another has Randolph alive and in office until his death in 1703, and the primary record has not been read on the point. The collector of Jamaica writing on 30 April 1719 is John in the calendar text and James in the same volume's index, and the Boston deputy collector appears as Payne in one place and Pain in another. Tobias Knight's guilt or innocence is genuinely contested: the accusation of 26 May 1719 is documented and does not settle the case, and the trial and verdict said to have followed it have not been traced in the North Carolina colonial records, which would settle the point. No total for the number of customs officers in England or in the plantations has been established, and no proved case of a customs officer knowingly trafficking pirate goods for profit has been found, only named instances of accusation, obstruction and failure to take bond.
Private Shipyards and Victuallers: The private victualling trade of the merchant and slaving ports is the thinnest part of the story: no named private victualling house, contract or price has been traced for 1690 to 1725, and no ropewalk, sailmaking loft or anchor forge of the period can be named and dated. Whether any incorporated body of these trades existed in England between 1690 and 1725 is unsettled, no charter, patent or company minute book having been consulted for it. Captain William Castle of Deptford, who built the Adventure Galley, is a name and nothing more; his dates, the extent and location of his yard and whether he built for the Navy Board are all open, and the Navy Board contract ledgers, the Deptford parish and manorial records and the Survey of London volumes for Deptford would settle them. The purchase price of the Adventure Galley has no primary basis, and the purchase in August 1696 that later writers give is set aside because the articles of 10 October 1695 already provide for a ship to be bought forthwith, for Kidd to have the command of her and for him and Robert Livingston to pay a fifth part of her cost; the Chancery and Admiralty papers of the syndicate would give the cost. The owners of the two sloops hired against Blackbeard in November 1718, the terms of their hire and the sums Spotswood paid are unknown, and the Virginia Council journals and Spotswood's correspondence would settle them. Workforce figures for the Thames yards within the period are missing, the survey figures used being of 1666 and earlier than the period, and colonial shipbuilding outside Bermuda, in particular New England, is not covered for want of period figures.
The London Merchant Networks: No London merchant petition or memorial specifically about pirates appears in the Journals of the Board of Trade or in the calendared colonial state papers, and the Board's journal for January 1720 records no piracy business at all; the petition that moved a Secretary of State against West Indian piracy in 1717 came from the merchants of Bristol. A reported 1726 petition of ninety four signatures, said to include Morice and Harris, does not appear in the Board of Trade Journal for February to May 1726, and the Journals of the House of Commons after 1699 have not been consulted, so the parliamentary side of this interest remains untested. What the Board reported at the end of the African trade inquiry of 1726, and whether the separate traders got what they asked for, is not established; only the hearings are. No aggregate figure for London merchant losses to pirates, as distinct from the above three hundred thousand pounds claimed against Spanish depredation since Utrecht, has been found. Richard Harris, named beside Humphry Morice at every sitting, is a name and nothing more: his dates, firm, ships and City offices are all unestablished, as is the identity of the City subscriber to the Kidd syndicate, named as Sir Edmund Harrison by one account and as Sir Richard Blackham by another.
The New York Merchant Networks: Frederick Philipse's own letters to Adam Baldridge are reported to survive but have not been read, so their content is unknown; Jacob Judd's 1971 article on Philipse and the Madagascar trade, the Philipse papers at Historic Hudson Valley and the relevant Colonial Office class would settle it. The money figures are mostly second-hand reports by a hostile governor and do not reconcile: Bellomont's rate of one hundred and fifty pounds a passage cannot be squared with Giles Shelley's own accounting or with Edward Buckmaster's hundred pieces of eight. The custom house accounts behind the Board of Trade's comparison of the New York revenue for 1687 and 1692 to 1697 have not been consulted, so no customs figure is given. Whether the Robert Hackshaw named in the Board's journal for January 1698/9 is the B. Hackshaw who subscribed the London merchants' petition of the following month is unsettled, as is the cause of the St Mary's rising of 1697, on which Baldridge and Kidd give contradictory accounts. Council tenures for Philipse, Bayard, Van Cortlandt, Nicoll and Pinhorne are not given, no office-holder list having been found; only their membership in 1698 is established. The papers consulted stop in 1706, so the absence of any conviction of a New York merchant principal is an absence in those papers and not established beyond that date; the minutes of the New York supreme court and of the vice admiralty court for 1699 to 1710 would settle it.
The Caribbean Plantation Economies: No plantation account, inventory or letter book has been read for this page, and no estate figure has been verified from the returns it derives from. The Codrington plantation accounts among the papers of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the wills and inventories proved in Barbados and Jamaica, and the naval office shipping lists at Kew would fix what an estate was worth, how many people were held on it and what tonnage cleared in a season. No figure for the value of Caribbean shipping or cargo taken by pirates in any year between 1690 and 1725 has been found in any document here. The Barbados laws used are the London compilation of 1721 rather than the assembly's own rolls, and the date of the grant of the four and a half per cent duty is not established from them. The two December 1722 papers on the merchants' call for a pardon, and the Jamaica reports of scarcity in 1717 and 1718, stand only on the calendar editor's preface and summaries and have not been traced to the originals in the Colonial Office series.
The Atlantic Insurance Markets: The two charters of 1720 are missing, and with them what powers the Crown granted and to whom. The Act that secured them restrained several extravagant and unwarrantable practices; which practices those were lies in the enrolled text, and the charters would say who was licensed to write a policy under them.
The Old Bailey Criminal Court: The City's own records would settle several open points and have not been consulted: the sessions files, gaol delivery books and repertories of the Court of Aldermen held by The London Archives. The tenure of the deputy recordership has no dates, John Raby appearing on the bench on 13 January 1720 and nowhere else; the annual fee the printer paid the Lord Mayor for the privilege of the Proceedings is unknown; and no figure has been found for the cost of holding a sessions. No sessions by sessions count of the court's business in the period can safely be made, because editions of the Proceedings are missing for two thirds of the sessions between 1699 and 1714 and for the whole of 1701, 1705 and 1706. That the printed Proceedings report no piracy trial between 1690 and 1725 comes from searches of a digitised corpus that were not exhaustive, and the Recorder's tenure in 1714 and 1715, and the end of Sir Charles Hedges' tenure as judge of the Admiralty, are given differently by different sources.
Colonial Militias and Private Defence: No colonial militia statute has been consulted, so the establishment, ages of liability, muster frequency, arms requirement and penalties of the Virginia, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Jamaica militias are all unstated; the printed session laws, Hening's Statutes at Large, Cooper and McCord, and the Acts of the Assembly of Jamaica would settle it. The legal basis of a governor's power to press private vessels is not stated in the despatch that records the pressing, and the Act of Parliament which Sir Nicholas Lawes believed in November 1720 had made the statute of 11 and 12 William perpetual is not identified. No sum is recorded for the cost of any expedition: five separate documents say the expense was great and none says how great, which the treasury accounts of South Carolina and Jamaica and Spotswood's personal accounts would repair. Whether Jonathan Barnet held a current commission on the day he took Rackham is not established, and the Jamaica commission registers or the printed trials of Rackham and his company would answer it. Three conflicts stand unresolved: the Cape Fear casualty figures between the Council's despatch and the printed General History; the manning of the Ocracoke sloops, fifty five against fifty seven; and the place of Richard Worley's death, Charles Town against the Virginia capes.

Primary Sources

The French Passes: Two passes, for the Rouparelle and the Quedagh (Cara) Merchant, survive in print through the House of Commons Journal (XIII.21), transcribed in Jameson's 1923 edition, and were rediscovered among Board of Trade papers in 1910, the year resting on secondary assertion. The originals are at The National Archives as CO 5/860 Nos. 64 ii and 64 iii, enclosures to Bellomont's letter No. 64, and the custody chain is documented; what is still wanting is modern photography of either original, the textual readings still coming through the printed transcriptions and Paine's 1911 facsimile of one pass, and an answer to why the passes were not produced at the trial.
The Tryals of Joseph Dawson and Others (1696): Fully digitised in multiple public-domain copies: Library of Congress (LCCN 19011844), HathiTrust (mdp.35112204867115) and the EEBO-TCP transcription A63217. The title-page start date of 29 October 1696 is a printer's error; the body reads 'Monday the 19th Day of October', corrected against the body text.
The Tryals of Captain John Rackam (1721): The ESTC number and the wider list of holding libraries (British Library, John Carter Brown) are not yet confirmed. The originals at Kew (CO 137/14/1) and the National Library of Jamaica have not been collated against the facsimile page by page. The appended text of the 11 and 12 William III piracy Act is poorly preserved in the digitised copy and has not been verified line by line.
A Full and Exact Account of the Tryal of all the Pyrates (1723): The pamphlet is the period print of the proceedings and is distinct in class from the manuscript proceedings in HCA 1/99 (not digitised). Its pagination and the surviving scan carry defects noted in the source room.
The Admiralty Records (TNA ADM): The surviving log volume and piece reference for HMS Swallow's Guinea cruise of 1721 to 1722 have not been identified; a targeted search of ADM 51 and ADM 52 in Discovery would confirm survival and the exact piece number. The covering-date span of the ADM 36 ships' musters series has not yet been confirmed against the Discovery series description. How far the Ocracoke and Cape Lopez actions are documented within ADM itself, rather than in the Colonial Office records and the printed trials, is untested; the reports of proceedings, if they survive, would sit in ADM 1 and must be located by ship and date. An on-site or partner-reproduction search at Kew, keyed to the named ships and dates, would settle all three.
Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies (1735): The full text of the Dictionary of National Biography notice on Atkins was not retrieved during compilation, so his dates, earlier service and bibliography are not yet verified from the primary record and should be confirmed directly. The publishers are recorded only as "Ward and Chandler"; the forenames Caesar Ward and Richard Chandler, which the page gives, are not yet verified from a catalogued copy of the title page and should be settled there. Pagination differs between the digitised 1735 copy and the antiquarian trade description of the 1737 issue, and the collation of each edition should be settled against a catalogued physical copy through the English Short Title Catalogue rather than a single scan. Atkins's numerical statements for the Cape Lopez action and the Cape Coast prisoners, meaning numbers of pirates, prisoners, executed men and quantities of gold, have not been collated line by line with the printed trial of 1723 or with the Admiralty and Colonial Office records, and no figure should be published from him until they are.
The Boston News-Letter: The precise 1717 issue and wording of the News-Letter's reporting on Samuel Bellamy and the wreck of the Whydah has not been pinned to an exact date, and the connection rests on scholarly use of the paper rather than on a directly quoted issue. The founding date appears both as 24 April 1704 and with the inaugural dateline of 17 to 24 April 1704; both refer to the same first number, and the difference is a dateline convention, not a conflict. Who edited and printed the paper after 3 November 1707 is not settled: the Isaiah Thomas history of printing, the American Antiquarian Society holdings and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts bibliographical notes and imprint studies have not been consulted on it. The date on which the paper ceased publication is not established. Every date taken from the paper is Old Style, with the year sometimes reckoned from a March new year.
The Colonial Office Records (TNA CO): The exact covering dates and internal arrangement of the piracy-bearing colony classes, CO 137 for Jamaica, CO 23 for the Bahamas, CO 152 for the Leeward Islands and CO 37 for Bermuda, have not yet been confirmed against the Discovery catalogue entry for each class. The editorial sequence and full span of the Calendar of State Papers Colonial are known only in outline, and the specific volumes covering about 1690 to 1725, with their editors, need confirming volume by volume on British History Online. The publisher, platform and current name of the Colonial State Papers image database are unsettled and want checking at the point of use, as commercial platforms change hands. The extent of microfilm-only or surrogate-only access, and which particular pieces are damaged or restricted, is not known for any named piece; the Discovery record and access conditions for each piece would settle it.
The Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: The total number of volumes in the America and West Indies series is stated variously; British History Online presents forty-one, but a definitive count would be settled by a national library catalogue record for the complete run. The publication years of the individual golden-age volumes edited by Cecil Headlam are not fixed from title pages here, the London 1930 imprint of volume 30, 1717 to 1718, being carried as probable, and the imprint of each volume should be taken from its own title page. Sainsbury's first America and West Indies volume is placed in the 1860s from the general calendaring programme rather than from a title page, and the attribution of later volumes to Arthur Percival Newton rests on the known editorial succession rather than on the volumes themselves. The scope and coverage of the subscription Colonial State Papers image resource, as against the free calendar text on British History Online, is drawn from a library description and should be confirmed with the publisher.
Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America: The author's nationality, birthplace, birth year and death year are unresolved and his name is variously spelled; parish, guild and notarial records at Honfleur and Amsterdam would be the route to settling them. The relationship between the two London imprints of 1684, those of William Crooke and Thomas Malthus, and what became of Morgan's action against the English text, need care and are best pursued through the Gibbs article of 2018, the court records and the surviving imprints themselves. How much of the added material in the English and French editions goes back to Exquemelin and how much to translators and publishers remains partly open, and can be adjudicated only by edition-by-edition collation against the Dutch text of 1678.
The London Gazette and the Newspaper Press: The precise date and calendar style of the Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates have not been fixed from the Gazette text itself, so no date for it is given; issue 5573 would settle the point. The issue numbers cited, 5573, 5575, 5632, 5655, 5706 and 5740, come from the Gazette's own editorial article on Atlantic piracy rather than from the digitised original issues, which have not been checked against them. The Gazette's origin, its early editorship and the later administration of its publication have not been traced in the primary record; the Gazette's own account of its history and the Stationery Office's records would settle them. How far the commercial and colonial papers reported at second or third hand, how far they reprinted one another, and how far their dates reflect the printing rather than the event are unsettled. Survival of the commercial press is partial and uneven, so the absence of a report proves nothing. Direct examination of the original Gazette issues and of the surviving newspaper runs at the British Library and in American research libraries would close these gaps.
A General History of the Pyrates (1724): Authorship is the central open question: the identity behind "Captain Charles Johnson" is unknown, the long-standing attribution to Daniel Defoe was discredited by Furbank and Owens in 1988, and the proposal of Nathaniel Mist remains an unproven hypothesis. Settling it would need new external evidence such as trade records, correspondence or a contemporary attribution, since internal stylistic argument has already proved unreliable. The exact sequence and dating of the intermediate editions between 1724 and 1728, and the precise imprint of each, are unconfirmed copy by copy against library catalogues. The boundary between documentary and invented content is not fully mapped, life by life, against the trial prints, the Calendar of State Papers Colonial, the Admiralty records and contemporary newspapers. Shelfmarks are copy-specific and vary by holding institution.
The High Court of Admiralty Records (TNA HCA): The piece-range descriptions of HCA 1 follow the archive's research guide, which gives document types rather than dates per piece, so individual piece contents and dates have not yet been confirmed against the online catalogue. The principle that the printed pirate trials were worked up from these sessions and examination papers is well founded but remains probable rather than settled, because the derivation must be demonstrated case by case against named pieces. The precise reference for the commercially digitised run of examinations of pirates and other criminals for 1721 to 1725 was not verified and should be cross-checked against the catalogue. The boundary between HCA 1 and the neighbouring HCA classes for colonial vice-admiralty proceedings is stated cautiously and needs a class-boundary check across the series.
East India Company Correspondence: With the published editions stopping at 1684 for IOR/E/3 and the western factories, and only the Madras material printed thereafter in the Records of Fort St George, the correspondence of 1690 to 1725 has never been systematically indexed for piracy, so nobody can currently state how many piracy references the class contains; only a volume by volume survey of IOR/G/36, IOR/G/3 and the relevant IOR/E/3 volumes would settle it. Item-level catalogue coverage for the 1690s is thin, and a keyword search on pirates surfaces only a handful of items for the decade, which reflects the state of cataloguing rather than the state of the records. The apparent break in IOR/G/36/112 between September 1695 and January 1696 is unresolved and consequential, and inspection of the volume against IOR/G/36/94 and IOR/G/36/95 would settle whether the autumn of 1695 survives on the received side. No specific letter about the confinement of the Surat factors, the indemnity negotiation or the convoy undertaking has been fixed to a shelfmark, and those documentary anchors must be supplied from the volumes before the Archive asserts the narrative. The catalogue's own date range for IOR/G/36/5 does not sit easily with its scope note and should be queried with the repository.
Mughal and Armenian Petitions and Complaints: No shelfmark has been established for the Armenian parchment deposition of the 1690s; its wording is published, its custodian is not named. No item-level reference for a petition by named Armenian merchants has been fixed in the Calendar of State Papers or in the East India Company's court minutes. Whether Persian-language petitions, imperial farmans or Surat qazi court records bearing on the losses of 1695 and 1698 survive in Indian repositories is not established. No verified figure exists for the value of the Ganj-i-Sawai's cargo, the sums demanded at Surat, the compensation paid by the Company or the lading of the Quedagh Merchant; the circulating figures are advocacy or later estimate.
Pirate Articles and Crew Agreements: The largest gap is the absence of a verified signed original: none has been traced for this Archive in a public repository catalogue as such, and settling the question would need a systematic sweep of the Admiralty criminal files at TNA HCA 1 for enclosures rather than depositions, since a seized sheet would be filed as an exhibit. The ten-clause set attributed to Edward Low has not been verified to issue level, and inspecting the Boston News-Letter of 1 August 1723 and the 1723 Tryals of Thirty-Six Persons pamphlet would confirm or refute it and its relationship to Lowther's eight clauses. The further sets listed for Cusack, Clough, Davis, Taylor and Anstis have not been traced to catalogue level, the full text of Fox's 2013 Exeter thesis being unretrievable, so neither the count of eleven sets reported from its appendices nor the figure of nine repeated by later writers can be asserted. Whether the Warner printing of 1724 is best treated as a distinct edition rather than an issue rests on the copy consulted and has not been settled by an edition-by-edition collation.
Naval Logbooks and Captains' Journals: No folio or page reference is given for ADM 51/954 or any other exhibit piece, because the online catalogue supplies none and no volume has been inspected; any folio citation added later must come from inspection at Kew. Whether a lieutenant's log survives at Greenwich in ADM/L for the Swallow or the Weymouth across the African cruise of 1721 to 1722, or for the Pearl or the Lyme across November 1718, has not been established, and the museum's own guidance warns that it is not always certain a log exists for a particular commission. The ADM 36 muster gaps, the Lyme master's log gap and the October 1721 to October 1722 gap in the Swallow's master's log all rest on catalogue searches, which are a reliable guide to what is catalogued but not proof of what does not survive; the paper series lists in the reading room at Kew would settle them. The Swallow's armament is genuinely contested at 50 guns against 54, and the discrepancy may reflect changes of establishment rather than error.
Merchant Depositions and Insurance Claims: The largest gap is insurance. There is no institutional archive of English marine underwriting before 1720, and the corporate archives that exist begin at the end of the period, so the cost of piracy risk in the 1690s or 1710s cannot be counted from insurance sources alone; item level inspection of the London Assurance committee minutes and ship charter records from 1720 at The London Archives, and a systematic search of merchants' private papers for policies and adjustments on West Indies and Guinea voyages, would settle it. A London Assurance loss on a Jamaica risk in October 1720 is unconfirmed, with no volume and folio yet cited for it. The citation for the Henry Bostock deposition of 19 December 1717 about Blackbeard, given in secondary work as CO 152/12/2 no 67iii, rests on a single secondary web source and does not appear on the December 1717 calendar pages consulted. No comprehensive series of London notarial protests for the period has been located, and whether HCA 15 lacks item level indexing is unconfirmed. Neighbouring entries on a single printed page of the calendar can carry different archival references, so a reference taken from the calendar needs checking against the page text.
Execution Sermons, Broadsides and Ballads: No original of the 1704 Quelch gallows broadside has been located: the Library of Congress copy is a positive photostat, and its catalogue entry does not name the copy from which the photostat was made. The American Antiquarian Society and Massachusetts Historical Society catalogues have not been searched for one. Whether Paul Lorrain's account of Kidd's execution was issued as a number of the Ordinary of Newgate's series or as a separate half-sheet publication is not established, nor whether it is included in the digitised series. The rival unofficial Kidd sheet is attested only by a library catalogue listing; its imprint, format and ESTC number have not been traced. Dating remains open on the ballad side, the London Kidd sheet being recorded as of unknown date and assigned to 1701 only on internal evidence, and the Every recruiting verses carrying a queried catalogue date of 1696 against a text that points to 1694. A live disagreement stands over the date of Mather's second 1717 sermon, the pamphlet heading reading "BOSTON. 27. d. VIII. m. 1717" while a Massachusetts Historical Society blog post gives 8 December 1717; the date printed on the pamphlet is the one used, and the disagreement stands.
Contemporary Maps and Sea Charts: No chart of a Caribbean pirate anchorage has been located with a survey date inside 1690 to 1725: every detailed harbour depiction found so far is either an administrative plan of 1723 or 1731 or a survey of 1767 to 1776, and whether that is a genuine documentary absence or an artefact of the search can only be settled by a systematic browse of CO 700 by region for items dated before 1726 and of MPG 1 for extractions from CO 5, CO 23, CO 137 and CO 152 within the period. Coolie Verner's carto-bibliography of the Fourth Book has not been consulted directly, so the edition counts and plate counts come from a dealer's summary of it rather than from its state and issue tables. The shelfmark, creator form and 1776 date recorded for the Tortuga sheet in the fonds of the Service hydrographique de la Marine come from an earlier note rather than from the catalogue record, the Bibliotheque nationale de France catalogue and image services having been unreachable when the entry was prepared. UK Hydrographic Office holdings are described at collection level only, and no individual pre-1725 item there has been identified. The use of captured Dutch and French charts by pirate crews is plausible but is not evidenced by any named deposition or trial record, and the plate complement of any given edition of A General History of the Pyrates is unresolved.
Ship Plans, Surveys and Fitting Accounts: The building of the Adventure Galley is the largest single gap: the Archive holds a verified letter-of-marque declaration and nothing verified about the yard, the builder, the contract or the launch, so the familiar Deptford attribution stays unasserted until it can be traced to Kidd's trial papers, the syndicate's accounts or a surviving shipbuilding contract. The Nantes reference for the 1718 depositions cannot be given in one form, the Queen Anne's Revenge project's own two publications conflicting on the folios and on the lieutenant's name, and neither has been checked against the current inventory at the Archives Departementales de Loire-Atlantique. No folio of ADM 180/1 has been examined, and the six verified Deptford yard letter book pieces leave gaps at 1696 to 1701, 1704 to 1709, 1711 to 1715 and 1720 to 1725 that a browse of the series either side of each gap would settle. Whether any of the English classes is available as digital images is unestablished, and physical consultation at Kew should be assumed. The absence of any contemporary draught of a pirate vessel is a working statement rather than a proved negative.
Modern Archaeological Reports: No final excavation report for the Whydah site is retrievable, and whether unpublished field records exist and on what terms they may be consulted is unknown; the artefact totals and the extent of the scatter quoted for the site are not verified from a published catalogue. No Florida Master Site File numbers for the 1715 wreck and camp sites could be obtained, those numbers being restricted in state practice, and whether any excavated 1715 material has been securely associated with the 1716 raid on the Spanish salvage camp is unestablished. Three dates in the cluster's own literature remain unsettled: the year of Edwin Link's first work at Port Royal, given as 1956 in one account and 1959 in another; the end of the Texas A and M excavation, given as 1990 in Hamilton's overview and 1991 on the project page; and the year and pagination of X Marks the Spot, dated 2006 with 339 pages by its review and 2007 with 368 pages by the publisher. The human-remains announcements of 2018 and 2021 from the Whydah site have no retrievable peer-reviewed osteological or genetic report behind them, and the NRHP reference numbers for 31CR314 and for the survivors' and salvagers' camp were not retrieved.
Museum Objects and Material Culture: No public item-level catalogue with accession numbers for the Whydah collection was retrievable, and whether one exists in non-public form, or whether the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources holds a permit-linked inventory, could be settled only by written enquiry to Expedition Whydah and to BUAR; in consequence the bell's exact lettering rests on secondary reporting that varies between GALLY and GALLEY, with no conservation record or catalogue entry behind it. The Ogle cup's reference T4426 is inferred from the naming of images on the museum's interpretive feature rather than cited in its text, searches of the Royal Museums Greenwich objects collection for T4426 and for the cup return no results, and the date, maker, hallmarks, dimensions and acquisition history of the piece are all unestablished here. The child-sized shoe, silk stocking, fibula, the age estimate of about 8 to 11 years and the association with the crew member John King have no retrievable source, and a forensic report or a Whydah Pirate Museum publication must be obtained before this ethically sensitive material is described at all. No surviving gibbet cage or gibbet ironwork demonstrably used on a named golden-age pirate, and no authenticated pirate flag of the 1690 to 1725 period, was identified, which is stated as the limit of the present search rather than as a proved absence. No accession number was published for the Queen Anne's Revenge urethral syringe, the sceptical literature answered by the 2012 identification article was not read in the original, and the custody of the alleged Blackbeard skull at the Peabody Essex Museum is asserted only in secondary writing and requires direct written confirmation.
Court of Admiralty Prize Cases: The whereabouts of the original French passes taken by William Kidd could not be established from the National Archives catalogue, though copies of both are recorded, and Dalton's two citations of the volume of the Journals of the House of Commons that prints them disagree with each other. No condemnation or restitution paperwork has been identified for Henry Jennings's Florida takings of 1715 to 1716, and whether Jennings personally held a commission from Lord Archibald Hamilton, as distinct from being one of a group of Jamaica sloops so commissioned, is not shown by the sources consulted. The precise dates on which the prize commission lapsed and was revived between 1713 and 1721 have not been fixed, and pieces catalogued across that interval cut against any clean vacuum. The piece boundary between the Nine Years War and War of the Spanish Succession blocks in HCA 32, specifically the status of HCA 32/43 to HCA 32/48, remains unresolved, and no golden-age Bahamian or Jamaican prize register has been traced. The current contents of the Prize Papers Portal and the coverage of the commercial Prize Papers Online have not been established.
Colonial Council Minutes: Jamaica is the weakest link: CO 140 and CO 137 are known at series level, but the council minute volumes of 1718 to 1721 have no piece-level description, and the Jamaica Archives and Records Department's own series list for the Council minute books has not been consulted. For South Carolina, no volume of Salley's printed series covers the sessions of 1718; where the manuscript minutes now are, and whether any council journal before royal government in 1721 comes down in the original rather than only in the Sainsbury transcripts, is unsettled. The North Carolina proceedings of 27 May 1719, at which Governor Eden and the council heard and cleared Tobias Knight, are reported in reference literature but have not been traced to a printed council text or page citation. The Massachusetts Council's executive records have not been fixed to a series, an extent or a printed edition, and no series number can yet be given for the New York colonial Council Minutes. Precise day dates for three New York entries, the Caverley examination, the Braddick committal and Spotswood's report that Roberts was on the coast, are uncertain, because the digitised text of Fernow's 1902 calendar interleaves its date column unreliably.
The Royal African Company Records (TNA T70): The extent of about 1,696 volumes and the covering dates of 1660 to 1833 are taken from the catalogue and are revised as cataloguing proceeds; they have not yet been confirmed against the live Discovery entry. The date ranges given for each creating company, the Royal Adventurers to about 1672, the Royal African Company to about 1750 and the Company of Merchants from 1750, are the catalogue's approximations and could be stated more precisely from the charters. The reported sentencing figures for the 1722 Cape Coast Castle trial differ between popular and scholarly accounts, and neither the exact numbers nor the identity of the presiding officers is fixed here; the 1723 print, A Full and Exact Account of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, and the court's file in the High Court of Admiralty papers at HCA 1/99 would resolve both. The exact publication dates and volume structure of Robin Law's edition of the local correspondence and of K. G. Davies's institutional history are not yet verified and need confirming from publisher and library catalogues. The authorship of the General History of the Pyrates, whose 1724 appendix carries a later reprint of the trial record, is contested and is left open.
The Printed Pirate Trial Pamphlets: The printer and precise imprint of the 1721 Jamaica edition of the Rackam pamphlet are not established, and can be settled only from the original or from a full bibliographical description. The extent to which each printed pamphlet corresponds to the surviving manuscript minute of its court is not uniformly documented, and systematic collation of print against the High Court of Admiralty criminal records at Kew, class HCA 1, would settle questions of selection, compression and error. Name spellings and aliases vary within and across the pamphlets, so prosopographical work must treat variant forms with care. The precise attribution and wording of individual depositions, such as the evidence given by Dorothy Thomas at the Jamaica trials, is best confirmed against the facsimile page rather than a secondary summary.
Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712): No English Short Title Catalogue citation number or individual library shelfmark for the 1712 first edition has been taken, so no physical copy is named on this page; one should be drawn from the English Short Title Catalogue or a named library catalogue. The second edition of 1718, printed for Andrew Bell and Bernard Lintot, survives and is digitised in the Internet Archive's eighteenth-century collection, but no English Short Title Catalogue number has been taken for it either. The captaincy of the consort Dutchess is not settled across the accounts consulted, the printed journal giving her to Stephen Courtney with Edward Cooke as second captain while popular histories make Cooke her commander; the voyage literature and the promoters' records should resolve it. The name of the captured Manila or Acapulco galleon, and the fate of a second galleon said to have been engaged and to have escaped, vary between accounts and have not yet been reconciled against Rogers, against Cooke and against Spanish records.

Themes

Pirate Articles: The verbatim article sets (Roberts, Lowther, Phillips) remain Johnson-only and capped at possible; no independent manuscript has been found. The Exquemelin chasse-partie wording is given at second hand and is not yet established character for character against EEBO-TCP A39081. 'Matelotage' is not attested in any primary source cited for this theme and is held unverified.
Quartermasters and Divided Authority: The 'civil Magistrate' summary, the two-shares figure and the mock 'House of Lords' are Johnson-only (possible). Rackham's, Hardy's and Corner's quartermaster titles rest on Johnson. Paul Williams as Bellamy's quartermaster is carried by no source cited here and would need the 1717 Boston trial of the Whydah crew. The internal procedure of the office in any named company is undocumented.
Crew Voting and Councils: Franchise and procedure (who exactly voted, how the count was taken, what majority was needed) are not established by the sources in evidence. The Bellamy election is held at very likely, the vote-versus-mutiny mechanism and month disputed. A fuller reading of Snelgrave 1734 on the Sierra Leone elections of 1719 would add a fourth independent witness; it is not yet drawn on here.
Pirate Pardons: The two proclamations (London Gazette 5573 and 5706) were read verbatim and their terms are confirmed. Pearse's surrender list of about 209 names (ADM 1/2282) was not read at the manuscript and is likely; the December 1718 Nassau trial of relapsed pardon-holders is carried on the Calendar of State Papers and later accounts and is not yet verified from the primary court record (CO 23/13); the surrender totals (about 200 at Nassau, and the numbers 'now out pirating again') are a moving census carried on the governor's despatches. Rackham's pardon at Nassau in 1719 is documented by Johnson alone, and he is not on the Providence surrender list of 3 June 1718, so it is capped at possible.
The End of the Golden Age: The label 'Golden Age of Pirates' is confirmed as a Fiske 1897 chapter title, read directly on Project Gutenberg; an earlier casual use of the phrase in 1894, attributed to the journalist George Powell, is not verified from his own text and is not asserted here. The 1716 to 1726 window is a deliberate editorial narrowing of a phrase that has always been used more broadly; the spans that Fiske, Cordingly and Konstam each give have still to be read in their own books before they can be stated. The four-instrument synthesis is likely. The naval strand is thin in digitised sources and largely at Kew (ADM series). The one missing piece is the decline evidence, a governor's report of 1724 to 1726 that the seas were clear, not yet located in any primary source in evidence. Born/died carry the suppression window rather than being suppressed.
Careening and the Haven Economy: How often a hull needed careening is not fixed by the record; it remains an inference from the rate of fouling and worm attack rather than a documented schedule, and pirate or naval logs recording successive careens of the same vessel would settle it. No paying recipe is securely documented for any named golden-age pirate hull. Population figures for the havens are round estimates and not counts, none of them verified from the primary record; the contemporary musters that would settle them largely do not survive. The coherence of the haven economy as a single system remains an interpretive frame best presented node by node.
Death: Battle, Disease and the Gallows: The relative proportions of death by disease, accident, shipwreck, combat and execution cannot be quantified for pirates specifically: the primacy of disease and sea hazard is well founded in the general maritime record but rests on inference rather than any pirate census, and a systematic reading of surviving muster, trial and burial records would sharpen it without ever yielding hard percentages. The story that Roberts's crew cast his body overboard rests on the 1724 General History alone and cannot be independently confirmed, while the tally of Blackbeard's wounds comes from Maynard's report of examining the body and the Boston News-Letter; contemporary naval correspondence and court records collated in full would settle both if anything can. Reported totals for those tried and sentenced after Roberts's defeat vary between sources in the numbers acquitted, respited or sent to servitude, though the fifty-two hanged is consistent across the sources read here.
Flags and the Jolly Roger: The etymology of "Jolly Roger" is unsettled. The popular derivation from the French "jolie rouge" is thin in French sources and may be folk etymology; an early eighteenth-century French pirate or privateer use of the phrase, or a documented English chain running from "Old Roger" to "Jolly Roger", would settle it. The chronology of firsts is not yet verified from the primary record: the naval logs behind it have still to be read here, and no chronology drawn from them could in any case show that no such flag was flown earlier. Many captain-specific designs, Bartholomew Roberts's among them, depend on the 1724 General History alone, and would move up or down only on independent corroboration from trial records, newspapers or naval logs. No physical golden-age pirate flag has been authenticated, so nearly every image in circulation is an interpretive reconstruction from a verbal description or a later illustration.
Pirate Justice and Discipline: The largest uncertainty is the ratio of prescription to practice: surviving articles record what a company resolved, not how discipline was actually enforced, and independent corroboration is thin outside marooning and the fact of the quartermaster's office. The number of surviving article sets is not established from the primary record, and only a census against Admiralty records and the early editions of the 1724 General History would settle it. The duel-ashore choreography and the smoothness of the company vote as a judicial procedure are both under-evidenced beyond Johnson, and would be strengthened only by independent trial depositions describing such proceedings from the inside. The Anstis mock trial of 1722 must be handled as satire; whether any crew ever ran a genuine formal tribunal, as opposed to an ad hoc vote, is not established by the present record. What would most advance the theme is systematic work in the surviving High Court of Admiralty and colonial Vice-Admiralty trial papers, where witnesses sometimes described internal pirate discipline, to test Johnson's picture against sworn testimony.
Marooning: The frequency of marooning cannot be established: it is prominent in narrative but may have been uncommon beside flogging or execution, and only a systematic count across surviving trial papers would settle it. The universal contents of the marooning kit are equally out of reach, since John Phillips's articles of 1724 are the only exact list and represent one crew's rule rather than a fixed standard; further sets of articles or trial depositions specifying provisions would fix it, and the 1724 printing of the Phillips articles should be read against the wording quoted. The derivation of the word maroon is not verified from any authority of record; a dictionary of record or a firm philological authority would be needed to establish it. Edward England's marooning on Mauritius in 1720 and his escape to Madagascar rest substantially on the 1724 General History, a source that embellishes, and would need colonial or East India Company papers from Mauritius or Madagascar to be stated as more than probable. Two points commonly attached to marooning are not verified from the primary record: the setting ashore and recovery of Alexander Selkirk, which Woodes Rogers's published account of the 1708 to 1711 cruise would settle, and the origin of the black spot, which Treasure Island itself, in the 1881 to 1882 serial and the 1883 book, would settle.
Prizes, Cargoes and Fencing: The internal structure of the fencing networks, their volumes, prices and margins, is largely undocumented: receivers kept no records for prosecutors, and the trade must be reconstructed from hostile or fragmentary material such as gubernatorial correspondence, Board of Trade complaints and later prosecutions. Systematic work on vice-admiralty condemnation records, merchants' account books and customs entries in the haven ports would settle much of this. The precise contents of William Kidd's Gardiners Island cache require the original recovery inventory in the Colonial Office and state papers; the item list given in popular retellings is not yet verified. Because owners recorded what they had lost and nobody recorded what pirates declined, distinguishing what was carried off from what was left, burned or released is usually impossible from the surviving record.
Recruitment: Volunteers and Forced Men: The volunteer and forced categories are a documented legal distinction but cannot be verified for most individuals, because the only surviving account of how a man came aboard is usually his own, given under threat of hanging. All demographic proportions here, the ages, the marital status, the national composition and above all the share of men of African descent, are estimates from partial samples of depositions and musters rather than counts; the frequently cited figure that as much as a third of Caribbean pirates were Black is a single scholar's approximation and is possible at best. The reported totals for the Cape Coast Castle trial of 1722, about fifty-two hanged and some twenty sentenced to servitude, differ between accounts and want reconciliation against the printed trial record. Whether any specific acquittal in the Charleston trials of 1718 turned on a successful plea of force cannot be shown from the published summaries; the printed 1719 proceedings would settle it. What would close these gaps is a systematic collation of the printed trial records against the admiralty and Colonial Office papers, together with a pooled demographic study larger than the existing samples.
Plunder, Shares and Compensation: The quantitative record rests on a handful of printed article-sets, overwhelmingly those carried in the 1724 General History of the Pyrates; original signed articles almost never survive, because crews destroyed them to deny the evidence at trial, and the discovery of an authentic manuscript set would materially strengthen the record. It is not established how consistently the written share ratios and injury payments were honoured in practice as opposed to agreed on paper, a question that trial depositions and prize inventories might settle in particular cases. Several of Lowther's articles survive only outside the General History, in newspaper and trial print, and a full collation of those variants against the printed text would clarify what was actually agreed. The description of the injury clauses as workmen's compensation predating the state's by two centuries is an interpretation rather than a fact, and a disputed one. The graduated buccaneer tariff recorded by Exquemelin is routinely conflated by later writers with the flat golden-age payments; the two are distinct.
The Slave-Trade Nexus: Crew-composition numbers are estimates rather than musters: the figure of 30 to 50 men of African descent among the Whydah's company rests on museum and archaeological interpretation of the wreck, and a surviving crew list would settle it. The fate of the enslaved people aboard most prizes is undocumented, so the general presumption that they were sold rather than freed is inferential; plantation, parish or Royal African Company sale records for named prizes would confirm individual cases. Whether Black men taken with pirate companies were sold rather than tried, and by what legal mechanism, is not established from the primary record; the Cape Coast Castle trial file and the Admiralty correspondence around it would settle it, and would also give the numbers taken, condemned, hanged and sold at the trial of 1722. Bartholomew Roberts's reported attacks on Bunce Island in 1719 and 1720 are not verified from the primary record, and the Royal African Company's own factory records for those years would settle them. Free Black pirates drawing shares and the routine sale of captured Africans existed in the same companies in the same years, and neither cancels the other.
Naval Suppression and Its Tactics: The number hanged after the Cape Coast Castle trials of 1722 varies between sources, fifty-two being the figure usually printed and fifty-four appearing in some accounts, with further men dying in captivity or sentenced to servitude; a transcription of the original trial minutes would settle it. Governor Spotswood's graduated bounty schedule of November 1718 and the mechanism that funded it have not been verified from the original proclamation or from the Virginia Assembly's act, and only the proclamation text would fix them. The naming of Maynard's two hired sloops as Jane and Ranger rests on later accounts and needs confirmation from the Admiralty and Colonial Office correspondence. The report that Chaloner Ogle was the only Royal Navy officer knighted specifically for service against pirates is widely repeated but has not been checked against the knighthood records. The hanging of John Rackham at Port Royal in November 1720, and the gibbeting on the cay afterwards called Rackham's Cay, are not yet verified from the printed trial; The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and other Pirates, Jamaica 1721, would settle them. The date on which Woodes Rogers sailed from the Thames is not fixed by any paper yet read, and would come from the Admiralty and Colonial Office correspondence. The relative weight of pardon, force and base denial in ending the golden age is a matter of historiographical emphasis rather than settled fact, and several vivid particulars of the Ocracoke and Cape Lopez fights descend from the 1724 General History without independent corroboration.
Alcohol, Food and Water at Sea: No period ration of fresh water in English naval or merchant service was established, so the quantity every voyage actually turned on cannot be stated; the Victualling Board's establishment papers and pursers' accounts would settle it. No merchant scale of provisions was recovered for 1690 to 1725, and the statement that victuals formed part of a mariner's remuneration rests on an inference from Admiralty wage litigation rather than on any document read. The purser's fourteen-ounce pound and thirty-five-fluid-ounce quart are evidenced by a manual of 1761, so their application to this window is inference. Whether the printed Jamaica trial of 1721 carries the drinking evidence the General History prints for the nine turtlers is untested, the only copy seen being too poor to read, and the extent to which that book reproduces the Cape Coast minutes verbatim has not been collated against the High Court of Admiralty file. Paul Lorrain's half sheet of 1701, Huntington call number 14152, would settle whether William Kidd was drunk at his execution and has not been read; no documented case of scurvy in a golden-age pirate company was located.
Cargoes and Commodity Values: No documented commodity price series for sugar, tobacco or logwood in any single year between 1690 and 1725 has been found; the only prices are John Atkins's, and they are one trader's recollection of a single season. The market rate at which foreign coin was exchanged for sterling is not established: no merchant's account book, price current or colonial ledger recording an actual conversion has been found. No account book, ledger or inventory made by pirates has been found, so every figure for what a company held comes from a victim, a prosecutor, a naval officer or a printed narrative. No marine premium rate and no named underwriter is known for any voyage of the period, which removes the market's own valuation of cargo at risk. Whether the phrase eight pounds of gold dust means troy or avoirdupois weight is not established, and the answer changes the Whydah ransoms by about a fifth.
Charts, Maps and Route Knowledge: The central hole is that no named golden-age pirate company is documented taking a named chart, atlas or pilot book out of a named prize, and no company is shown owning or using a printed pilot book; a systematic search of High Court of Admiralty examinations, the colonial state paper calendars and the inventories of goods restored to plundered masters for the words chart, draught, waggoner, plat and platt would establish whether such items were itemised at all. The monsoon and Red Sea mechanics used here rest on an East India sailing directory of 1791, sixty-six years after the period, used only for a wind regime that is a physical constant; a period English or Dutch directory of the 1690s to 1720s, or the East India Company's own standing sailing instructions, would put the seasonal rules inside the window. That pirate stations at Bab al-Mandab were timed to the monsoon is co-occurrence only, since no deposition, examination or letter records a pirate stating a seasonal reason for a station. The carto-bibliography of the English sea atlas, the Thames school literature and the economic history of the monsoon trading systems have yet to be brought to bear, and the general wind and route framework, including the corridors that shipping is said to have run in, is not yet verified from any period document. Whether the surveying instruments from the Queen Anne's Revenge site were plunder, cargo or pre-capture French fittings is unresolved, and the Whydah dividers are known only through the excavating project's comparison.
Disease and Shipboard Medicine: Every mortality figure in this record is John Atkins's, printed thirteen years after the events, and the Admiralty muster and pay books for the Swallow and Weymouth for 1721 to 1723 have not been collated against it; whether the Isle of Princes burials fall inside the whole-voyage total is not stated, so the two figures cannot be added. The cause of the 1721 outbreak is unknown and must stay unknown: Atkins writes inside a miasmatic frame, and no source yet read applies malaria, yellow fever or any other modern diagnosis to those deaths. The pirate medical constitution, the non-signing custom, the election, the quarter share and the jurisdiction over plundered chests, comes entirely from trial evidence as printed in one 1724 book, corroborated across several deponents within that text but nowhere outside it; the manuscript trial file and comparable evidence from the Newport, Boston and Old Bailey pirate trials would settle it. The Charles Town medicine chest has no located independent witness, the South Carolina Council journals for May 1718 and the depositions printed with the 1719 Bonnet trial being the obvious tests. The Beaufort Inlet wreck's identification as Queen Anne's Revenge is strongly supported but circumstantial, and what rests on the wreck is limited accordingly: the syringe cannot show who used it, on whom, or any prevalence in a crew. No pirate medicine chest has ever been excavated, so the material record is one instrument and a mortar and pestle rather than an assemblage, and venereal disease among ships' companies is nowhere quantified.
Hurricanes and Wrecking: No period tabulation of shipping losses by cause has been found, so the proposition that the sea killed more of these men than the gallows did cannot be settled and is left as a question; only the archive's own local counts support the narrower comparison. Cyprian Southack's journal, letters and annotated map of the Whydah wreck are said to survive but were not read, so his commission wording and his remark about the riches being buried in the sand are not yet verified from the primary record. Nothing yet found establishes the English law of wreck as it stood between 1690 and 1725, which is why the salvage-to-plunder gradient is described in terms of possession rather than of any stated rule; the 1735 false-lights offence and the Wreck Act of 1753 both postdate the window. No period English description of a diving engine has been found, the General History names the apparatus without describing it, and no insurance policy or underwriter's book showing a seasonal exclusion or surcharge on West Indian voyages has been found. The character of the storm of 26 April 1717 rests on unattributed modern statements: the wind speeds, wave heights and sandbar figures carry no source, Thomas Davis says nothing of them, and the historical climatology that would place these storms in tracked seasons, principally Ludlum and Chenoweth, has not been read.
Mutiny and Desertion: No rate, count or series for either offence between 1690 and 1725 is known: no count of naval courts martial for mutiny or desertion, no desertion rate for any fleet or station, and no figure for merchant desertion in a colonial port. Nothing yet shows how a naval mutineer or deserter of these years was punished in fact rather than in statute, no sentence, execution or pardon having been traced. For the ships that hunted pirates the muster books in ADM 36, where a desertion was recorded, do not survive across the relevant years, so the gap cannot be closed even at Kew for those vessels. The day of the Every rising is unresolved between the indictment's 30 May 1694 and later writers' 7 May, as is the manner of Captain Gibson's departure, and the particulars of the 1724 George galley rising conflict between the 1725 London narrative and later writers as to the ship and the place. The Gambia Castle case of Lowther and Massey rests on a published abstract alone.
Navigation and Seamanship: No navigational record kept by any golden-age pirate company is known: no log board, no reckoning, no traverse table, so nothing can be said about how pirate companies kept their reckonings or whether their practice differed from merchant practice, and a systematic search of High Court of Admiralty exhibit files and of the Boston, Charleston and Jamaica court papers for charts, log books and instruments seized with pirate vessels would be the way to advance it. The Cape Coast Castle trial matter behind the artist doctrine has been read only as reprinted in the 1724 General History, and is not an independent witness to that book's own narrative until the surviving Admiralty file is collated against the printing. Whether the Board of Longitude met at all before the end of the window is unverified from the Board's own papers, and its minutes, together with the Journals of the House of Lords for the assent of the Act, would settle whether the Act had any operational effect within the window. The three standard monographs on navigational practice, Waters 1958, Taylor 1956 and Hewson 1951, are unread. Whether the pegged traverse board was in general shipboard use in English vessels between 1690 and 1725 is not established either way, and nothing is yet known of navigational instruments recovered from the Whydah or Beaufort Inlet assemblages.
Privateering and Letters of Marque: No letter of marque, warrant, declaration, bond or bail has yet been seen in the original or in facsimile, so the account of the commissioning procedure rests on The National Archives' descriptions of HCA 25 and HCA 26 and on the secondary literature; a single golden-age declaration with its matching warrant, bond and bail, transcribed in full, would settle it. The prize shares are read from the statute of 1692 itself, but the Act of 1708 said to have abolished the Crown's share in goods taken by privateers and to have required the Admiralty to issue letters of marque to all who applied has not been read in its text, so the Statutes of the Realm are the next step. No quantitative series is offered, because the counts of commissions by Starkey and Meyer have not been used; the one aggregate given is local, the 127 Bristol declarations of 1702 to 1713. The proportion of golden-age pirates who had previously held commissions is left open; settling it would need a prosopography tested against HCA 26, which names commanders, owners and officers but gives the crew only as a number. Forged commissions remain unevidenced rather than disproved, no forgery prosecutions or colonial records of commissions granted having been searched.
Prize Law and Condemnation: No quantitative series has been established: not the number of prize causes commenced in either war, not the number of condemnations or restitutions, and therefore not the rate at which claimants succeeded; the calendars of ships and goods taken as prize in IND 1/9013 to IND 1/9021, read against the act books and the sentences, would begin to settle it. The statute text of the Cruizers and Convoys Act of Anne has not been collated, so the surrender of the Crown's shares and the substitution of head money for gun money rest on two later accounts that agree in substance and differ over the condition attached to head money and over whether gun money survived. The date at which colonial vice admiralty courts acquired prize competence is given variously as 1662, 1692 and 1708, and the choice among them is not settled from an instrument. Almost no colonial prize proceedings of 1690 to 1725 survive at Kew, such records often consisting only of returns in the form of lists of adjudications, with many never transferred at all. The captures of the wars of 1652 to 1697 remain outside the name indexing of the prize papers, which is precisely the block covering the Nine Years War voyages.
Ship Construction and Repair: Repair is far better documented than construction: the pirate side of it comes through narrative, the building side through administrative papers, and the specifics of English building in the 1690s, oak selection and seasoning, compass timber, treenail fastening and oakum caulking, are not yet verified from any document read. Neither the dating of lead sheathing nor the point at which the corrosion of iron fastenings under copper was discovered has been established from a primary record. The shore establishment for docking and repair, at Portsmouth and at the overseas yards, is likewise unverified from a primary record, and John Atkins's printed narrative of the Swallow and the Weymouth taking in careening gear at Portsmouth remains to be worked up as a statement in its own right. A published assessment of lead hull repairs on the Queen Anne's Revenge site has not yet been seen, and no hull-remains report for that site, and none for the Whydah, has been read. No period statement of a cleaning interval is known, so the commonly quoted two or three months in tropical water is left out. The end of the Adventure Galley is not yet verified from the primary record: Kidd's own Narrative, the Buckmaster testimony and the crew examinations would settle the manner of her end, and her builder and launch date with it. The idea that pirates favoured Bermuda-built cedar sloops has no cited case.
Weapons and Gunnery: The gun count of the Queen Anne's Revenge is unresolved and one page image away from resolution: the available transcription of the 1724 General History reads that Teach mounted no guns aboard the captured Guineaman, where a numeral is expected, and the familiar forty guns come from later writers rather than from any period source. No period gunner's manual was read, John Seller's The Sea-Gunner of 1691 being known only from its catalogue entry, so nothing said about how a gun was served is verified from drill; no naval log, ordnance return or gunner's store account was seen. No armament for HMS Swallow is established from the primary record, and she was rebuilt in 1719, so the guns she actually fired at Cape Lopez are not known. The Whydah's ordnance has no technical literature at all: no armament figure for her is verified from the primary record, and her two recovered cannon are known only by weight. The claim that Bartholomew Roberts was killed by grapeshot in the throat, and the slings of pistols worn by Teach and by Roberts, rest on the 1724 book alone and have no corroboration in the sworn depositions printed in the same volume or in John Atkins's eyewitness narrative of 1735; the Swallow's log and Chaloner Ogle's journal in the Admiralty records were not searched. The stinkpot, a fixture of popular accounts, does not occur in the 1724 text searched in full and no golden-age instance of it has been found; the blunderbuss occurs in neither the 1724 book nor Atkins's narrative of 1735, so its presence in golden-age pirate hands remains an inference from general naval use.
Shipworm and Environmental Damage: No period account names the borer, the accounts giving the damage and the remedy rather than the animal, so the theme's central animal is present only as an inference from behaviour and its biology is unverified; no malacological source has been read. The proposition that boring was markedly worse in Caribbean and West African water than in northern European water is not quantified by any source yet read, and no period careening interval has been found, so none is stated. The shipworm attribution for the loss of HMS Roebuck comes from later writers and is absent from Dampier's own narrative, and that the Adventure Galley was worm-eaten is unevidenced in any account yet read, while the two accounts of her disposal conflict. The three companies lost while cleaning all come from one narrative of contested reliability, so the wording is firm and the pattern only suggestive. The identification of the Beaufort Inlet wreck as Queen Anne's Revenge is an argued conclusion from circumstantial evidence, with no name board, bell inscription or document tying the hull to the ship, and the bibliography of the agency excavating it carries one timber dating report and no published study of wood species identification, sheathing or marine borer damage. Navy Board and dockyard survey correspondence, insurance policies and colonial council minutes would settle the period's own quantitative evidence on worm-eaten condemnations, seasonal risk pricing and the dating of recorded careening stops.
The Admiralty Courts: No quantitative series is established: the number of Admiralty criminal trials held between 1690 and 1725, the number of persons arraigned, the number of commission courts assembled under the Act of 1700, and the proportion of acquittals to convictions are all uncounted, and would need a systematic count from HCA 1 and its examination books read against the surviving colonial trial printings. No original commission for the trial of piracy has been read, so everything said about what such commissions contained is taken from the statute that authorised them and from the recitals in the printed trials. The date at which colonial vice admiralty jurisdiction began is contested across five accounts, from the 1620s and 1630s to 1698, and would be settled only by the earliest colonial vice admiralty commissions, the Jamaica instructions of 1662 and the Navigation Act of 1696. Whether the Charles Town proceedings of 1718 sat under the jury machinery of 28 Hen. 8 c. 15 or under a commission of 1700 remains open until the pamphlet's own recital of the commission is read. No instance was found of a writ of prohibition being used against the criminal side of the jurisdiction or against a commission court, and that absence is not evidence that none existed; nor was any complete statement of the court's own procedure found, its clerks having rarely minuted routine matters.
Captain Election and Removal: Almost all of the surviving description of how the office worked comes from the General History of 1724, whose author is unidentified; strip that book out and six items remain, two examinations taken before the Governor at Boston in 1717, three statements in Snelgrave's narrative of 1734, and one deposition on Edward England's removal reached at second hand. Snelgrave had read the 1724 book and expressly wrote around it, so the apparent agreement of the two is not the agreement of independent witnesses. Whether the exclusion of forced men from the vote, recorded once for Bellamy's company, was general, whether any surviving set of articles wrote it down, and whether a forced man could be enfranchised by signing, are all open. The successor to Charles Vane is disputed, the 1724 book naming John Rackham twice, while the propositions that the underlying record leaves the quartermaster unnamed and that Rackham is undocumented before August 1720 are not verified from the primary record here; the report that a Vane trial record carries evidence of the crew vote is untested, no printed Vane trial having been located. No election is documented before 1716 and none at all for the Pirate Round companies of the 1690s, so whether the elective captaincy became commoner after 1716 or merely better recorded cannot be settled, and whether it was inherited from buccaneer practice is undecided. A systematic search of the High Court of Admiralty and colonial Vice Admiralty examinations for the words vote, chose, elected, majority and turned out is the research target.
Gender Disguise and Identity at Sea: The reading of Dorothy Thomas's evidence in the Jamaica print of 1721 is contested at a single letter, widely circulated transcriptions giving handkerchiefs tied about "their Heads" where the digitised National Library of Jamaica copy appears to give "their Head"; the word naming the edged weapon each woman carried is unreadable in that copy and is usually supplied as "Machet". Both need the original pamphlet at Kew or a high resolution image of the National Library of Jamaica copy. The proclamation of 5 September 1720 is held only through a modern transcription of the text as printed in a Boston newspaper of October 1720, and the newspaper issue itself has not been read. Article VI of the articles attributed to Bartholomew Roberts's company, the one period normative text on carrying a woman to sea disguised, has no independent manuscript witness. The printed piracy trials of 1696 to 1726 and the High Court of Admiralty examinations have not been searched systematically for other women in male dress, so part of the scarcity is a scarcity of searching. Nothing survives written by any woman who passed at sea in this period, and no further research will close that gap.
Naval Impressment: The single largest hole is quantitative: no annual series of seamen voted, borne or impressed for 1689 to 1713 has been traced, and no figure of scale is given; the annual votes of men in the Journals of the House of Commons and the Admiralty muster and pay books at Kew, which state for each man whether he was pressed or entered voluntarily, would settle it, and would settle the same gap for Utrecht at the same time. No protection document from within this window has been found, the surviving specimens listed by the National Maritime Museum being of 1756, 1802 and 1807. The exact citation and text of the American exemption remain unresolved, one source giving the Trade to America Act 1707 as 6 Anne chapter 64 section 9 and another a bare act of 1708 with no chapter number, and the reported opinions of the attorneys general of 1716 and 1740 are not yet verified from the primary record. Whether Kidd's crew was pressed on 1 March 1696, as Dalton has it from Kidd's own account, or during the April passage the other chronologies give, and how many men were taken, would be settled outright by a muster book showing men discharged into a King's ship from the Adventure Galley. The Weymouth's muster book for 1721 and 1722 would name the men impressed at Cape Corso Road, and Edward Barlow's journal at JOD/4 in the National Maritime Museum, the outstanding seaman's manuscript of these decades, has not been read.
Maroon Communities and Fugitive Networks: The Colonial Office correspondence for Jamaica between 1690 and 1725, and the colonial council minutes of the same decades, have not been searched; they would say what the colony knew about the maroons decade by decade, and are the likeliest place for any contact between pirate companies and maroon communities to surface. No period document has yet been identified recording a pirate company of 1690 to 1725 provisioning at, recruiting from or sheltering in a maroon community, and that negative finding describes the record as searched rather than the past. The king Atkins reports the Jamaican maroons had chosen cannot be identified or dated, because his own phrase marks the passage as latest advices in a book of 1735, and whether Cuba was in fact supplying them with powder and arms remains unestablished. The Windward treaty date is disputed between 23 June 1739 in the confirming act and 23 December 1739 in the National Library of Jamaica's account, and the proposal that the 1738 date in circulation is the Old Style year of Cudjoe's articles awaits the manuscript articles. Evidence from inside the period for enslaved people and servants escaping the English Caribbean by ship is almost absent, since the systematic runaway advertisement corpora begin after it.
Pirate Ports and Informal Economies: Four of the load-bearing documents were read only as Calendar of State Papers Colonial abstracts, and the manuscripts at The National Archives would settle every quotation taken from them. No rebuttal by Deputy Governor William Markham of Pennsylvania to Robert Snead's charges has been located, so the accusation cannot be called unanswered, and the sixty hogsheads of sugar said to have gone to Governor Charles Eden of North Carolina rest on Johnson's General History alone, against the reported acquittal of his secretary in May 1719. No named tavern, punch house or lodging house kept for pirate custom at Nassau, Port Royal, Charles Town, Newport or Boston can yet be documented from a primary source, which is the largest single hole in the theme and one shared with the Women at Sea record. No prosecution under the 1721 Act for trading with or supplying pirates has been traced, so neither its use nor its disuse can be stated, and no aggregate value of goods fenced through colonial ports is offered. Mark Hanna's Pirate Nests and Kevin McDonald's Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves, the two standard modern treatments, are so far known here only through a review, and reading them would probably alter several judgements here in either direction.
Race, Empire and Maritime Labour: The status of the men counted as Black aboard Bartholomew Roberts's ships is the central unknown: whether the forty-five aboard his own vessel were signatories to articles with shares or were, as John Atkins called them, slaves, would be settled only by the Cape Coast trial minutes or a list of the company by name, neither of which has yet been read. The printed Charles Town proceedings of 1719, which carry David Herriot's deposition and the sixty at Beaufort, are known so far only through two modern citations of them, and the printed Boston trial of the Whydah's men of 1717 has not been obtained. What became of the sixty to seventy-five men taken in February 1722 rests on one modern monograph and one newspaper feature; the Royal African Company's Cape Coast accounts and correspondence for 1722 would record a sale of that size. The 1724 disposal table's printed total of 276 and its column sum of 267 have not been reconciled against other copies of the 1724 and 1726 editions. No period count of an Asian seaman aboard any pirate vessel of this window has been found, and East India Company factory and Bombay marine papers are where such a record would surface.
Religion and Providence at Sea: No golden age pirate left a prayer, a diary, a letter or any devotional writing, so every statement about what a pirate believed reaches us through a judge, a chaplain, a governor, a prosecutor or a bookseller, and the great majority through a single commercial crime book of 1724; this gap will not close. No source yet found describes a pirate company holding a service, keeping a Sunday or ceasing work for worship, and the sabbath clause in the articles attributed to Roberts's company, like the clause forbidding women aboard, has no independent witness; a manuscript article set seized with a company, or a deposition in the High Court of Admiralty examinations reciting one, would settle both. Whether the refusals of the penitential script at Cape Coast in 1722, at Boston in 1717 and at Boston in 1726 were typical or exceptional cannot be settled without a systematic count across the Ordinary of Newgate's accounts and the colonial execution pamphlets. The religious reading of the plunder of Mughal pilgrim shipping in 1695 rests on the framing of the leading scholarship and on the nature of hajj shipping; no Persian or Arabic source has yet been read, and the East India Company's own instruments have not been checked for whether they describe the convoyed vessels as pilgrim ships. The confessional composition of pirate crews, and the supply and duties of colonial and Guinea factory chaplains, remain unestablished in either direction.
Trials, Evidence and Defence Rights: Everything established here about what a piracy court did rests on one statute and five printed proceedings; nothing in the High Court of Admiralty oyer and terminer series HCA 1, and none of the returns which section VI of the 1700 Act required the colonial courts to transmit to London, has been read, so how far the printed pamphlets are complete or edited is unknown. The jury question at Charles Town in 1718 is the sharpest unresolved conflict: the 1724 General History, the printed trial's title page and the public history of that court all record a grand jury and petit juries, while a standard modern narrative denies that vice admiralty courts had juries, and the likeliest reconciliation, that Judge Trott sat under the older statute of 1536, has not been established. Whether the grant of counsel at Boston in 1717 was usual or exceptional is unknown, no application for counsel appearing in the Newport proceedings of 1723 or at Boston in 1726, and why these courts acquitted as often as they did has not been tested between three available explanations, judicial scruple, genuinely thin evidence against late joiners, and the usefulness of acquitted men as King's evidence. The aggregate of 100 acquittals in 259 trials is arithmetic on five proceedings chosen because their figures survive complete, a selection biased towards well recorded courts, and should not be read as a general rate; the body of Joseph Gibbs's 2019 sampling, which would supply one, was not read. The fate of the seven men condemned at Charles Town but not named among the twenty two executed on 8 November 1718 is unrecorded in any source seen for this record.
Violence and Coercion: Several of the load-bearing documents are known only at second hand through modern scholarship quoting them: the sworn depositions of Edward North and John Wickstead in the calendared colonial papers, the American Weekly Mercury of June 1723, Richard Hawkins's own account in the British Journal of 8 August 1724, and Governor Hart's letter to the Council of Trade and Plantations of 25 March 1724. Until Hart's letter is read whole it cannot be said whether the best known Low atrocity has a period witness genuinely independent of the General History of 1724 or only a second channel out of the same colonial talk. The 1696 printed trial of Every's men, the only court record of the Ganj-i-Sawai, is known here from its title page alone, so no English sworn evidence has been set beside Khafi Khan's Persian account. Philip Ashton's narrative is known here through a 1976 facsimile transmitted through optical character recognition rather than through the 1725 Boston imprint. No quantitative study of Royal Navy punishment for 1690 to 1725 has been found, so the comparison with naval discipline leans on a study of the 1770s and 1780s; and no count exists of pirate killings, of ships taken, or of the share of takings that drew blood, though a ship-by-ship reconstruction from the colonial calendars, the newspapers and the trial records is possible in principle and has not been done.
Women at Sea: The trial print orders an inspection of the two prisoners after their plea of pregnancy and never reports the result, so what stands is a respite and not a pregnancy; the Jamaica council and assembly minutes for 1720 and 1721 would settle it. Anne Bonny disappears from the paper after 1721, and the burial entry of 1733 in Saint Catherine parish reported in 2020 by the researcher Tyler Rodriguez rests on a common name in a register that has not been inspected; Mary Read's burial of 28 April 1721 stands on the same uninspected series. No woman keeping a tavern, punch house or lodging house at Nassau, Port Royal, Charles Town, Newport or Boston between 1690 and 1725 can yet be named from a primary source, and no woman working a shipboard trade in an English vessel in the same window has been documented at all. Whether the printed pamphlet abridges the women's trial remains open, and it governs the standing of the General History's claim that evidence of Read shooting a man in the hold was given in court. Only one page of one calendar volume of the colonial state papers was read, so the silence of the administration about the two women is reported and not proved.

Collections

Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War: The Collection's central question is two-part (governance, then destruction) and its evidence is weighted to the end of the story. The final week (the two Cape Lopez actions, the death, the trial) rests on three independent period carriers: Ogle's dispatch (London Gazette 6091), the 1723 printed trial record, and Atkins's 1735 memoir. The early career and the governance detail (the articles text, the six-weeks election, the quartermaster) are largely Johnson-derived and capped at possible. The mass-execution superlative is softened to 'one of the largest' because the comparison set is unbounded; the 52 hanged is confirmed. Open leads: CO 37/10 (Martinique), and HCA 1/99 and the ADM logs and pay book at Kew, none of them digitised.