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  • person William Kidd (Captain Kidd; William Kyd; Robert Kidd (in the 1695 commission)) Commissioned privateer later convicted of murder and piracy.
  • person Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont (Bellomont; Lord Bellomont) Governor and investor connected to Kidd's commission and arrest.
  • person Robert Culliford (Robert Colleyford) Pirate captain associated with Kidd's crew desertion at Madagascar.
  • person William Moore Adventure Galley's gunner killed after Kidd struck him.
  • ship Adventure Galley Purpose-built privateering vessel fitted for sail and oar.
  • ship Quedagh Merchant (Cara Merchant) Indian-owned merchant vessel captured by Kidd in January 1698.
  • place Madagascar Indian Ocean island central to late seventeenth-century pirate activity.
  • event Trial of William Kidd (Kidd trial) Murder and piracy proceedings at an Admiralty sessions held at the Old Bailey, 8 and 9 May 1701.
  • document The French Passes (French passes) Documents relevant to French protection and the lawful prize argument.
  • person Henry Every (Henry Avery; Bridgeman (1696 proclamations); Long Ben; John Avery (1709 literary error)) English pirate who led the 1694 mutiny aboard the Charles the Second and took the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695, then vanished; his crew were tried in London in 1696.
  • ship Fancy (Charles the Second; Charles II) Armed merchantman of the Spanish Expedition Shipping venture, seized by mutiny at Corunna in 1694 and renamed; Every's ship through the Indian Ocean cruise.
  • ship Ganj-i-Sawai (Gunsway; Ganj-i-Sawa'i) The emperor Aurangzeb's great Surat treasure and pilgrim ship, captured and plundered by Every's company in September 1695.
  • event Trials of Every's Crew (Every crew trials; The Tryals of Joseph Dawson et al.) Admiralty sessions at the Old Bailey in 1696: the crew were acquitted on the Ganj-i-Sawai indictment at the first sitting, then convicted on the Charles the Second mutiny; five were hanged and one reprieved.
  • document The Tryals of Joseph Dawson and Others (1696) (The Every trial print; EEBO A63217; The Tryals of Joseph Dawson et al.) The printed record of the 1696 Admiralty trial of Every's crew, printed for John Everingham; the flagship digitised source for the Every case.
  • person Edward Thache (Blackbeard) (Edward Teach; Edward Thatch / Thach (period spellings); Blackbeard; Tatch (Dickinson letter, 1717)) Pirate captain active 1716 to 1718, killed at Ocracoke in 1718 and never brought to trial; no period document records him harming a captive before that final fight.
  • ship Queen Anne's Revenge (La Concorde (as a French Nantes slave ship)) French slave ship La Concorde, captured and renamed by Blackbeard in 1717, wrecked at Beaufort Inlet in 1718; the wreck (31CR314) was identified as Queen Anne's Revenge in 2011.
  • event The Ocracoke Fight (Death of Blackbeard; Battle of Ocracoke) The action at Ocracoke Inlet, 22 November 1718 (old style; 3 December new style), in which Blackbeard was killed by a Royal Navy party under Lieutenant Robert Maynard, sent from Virginia by Governor Alexander Spotswood.
  • person John Rackham (Rackam (1721 trial print); Rackum (Governor Lawes' dispatches); John Rackam (Rogers' proclamation, 1720); Calico Jack (not period; earliest attestation Gosse 1924)) Pirate captain whose securely documented career runs about two months in 1720; hanged at Port Royal and gibbeted.
  • person Anne Bonny (Ann Bonny; Ann Bonn / alias Bonn (1721 trial print, body); Anne Bonny, alias Bonn (1721 trial print, title leaf); Ann Fulford alias Bonny (Rogers' proclamation, 1720); Sarah Bonny (London Post-Boy, likely conflation); Anne Cormac (modern, invented in Carlova 1964)) Documented member of John Rackham's crew, 1720; tried and convicted at Spanish Town, reprieved on pleading pregnancy; later life undocumented.
  • person Mary Read (Mary Read (spelling stable across the period documents); Mary Road (London Journal, 1721; a period slip); Mark Read (alleged male alias; Johnson-derived)) Documented member of John Rackham's crew, 1720; convicted at Spanish Town, reprieved on pleading pregnancy, died in custody; buried 28 April 1721.
  • event The Trials of Rackham's Company (Rackham trials; The Tryals of Captain John Rackam) Vice-Admiralty proceedings at St Jago de la Vega that tried John Rackham's company (16 to 17 November 1720) and, separately, Mary Read and Anne Bonny (28 November 1720).
  • document The Tryals of Captain John Rackam (1721) (The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and other Pirates; The 1721 Tryals) The printed record of the 1720 to 1721 Jamaica piracy trials, including Rackham's company and Mary Read and Anne Bonny.
  • collection Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War (The Roberts Collection; COL004 (production ID)) The Archives' second Collection: how the most successful pirate crew of the Golden Age governed itself by election, written articles and a quartermaster's check, and how the state destroyed it in a naval action off Cape Lopez and a mass trial and hanging at Cape Coast Castle.
  • person Bartholomew Roberts (John Roberts (asserted birth name, modern attribution); Captain Roberts; Black Bart (modern); Barti Ddu (modern, twentieth-century coinage); The Great Pyrate (Johnson-derived)) Welsh pirate captain of the Royal Fortune, elected to command after Howell Davis was killed at Principe in 1719; cruised Brazil, the Caribbean, Newfoundland and West Africa; killed in action against HMS Swallow off Cape Lopez in 1722, after which fifty-two of his crew were hanged at Cape Coast Castle.
  • ship Royal Fortune (ex-Onslow (Royal African Company frigate, the last Royal Fortune)) The name Bartholomew Roberts gave in turn to several of his flagships. The last Royal Fortune was the Royal African Company frigate Onslow, taken in 1721 and mounted with 40 guns; she was captured by HMS Swallow in the action that killed Roberts. No wreck has been located.
  • ship HMS Swallow (the Swallow) The Royal Navy fourth-rate under Captain Chaloner Ogle that hunted Roberts's squadron off West Africa. She took the Ranger on 5 February 1722 and, on 10 February, engaged the Royal Fortune in the action in which Roberts was killed.
  • event The Cape Coast Trial and Executions, 1722 (the Cabo Corso trial; the trial of Roberts's crew) The Vice-Admiralty court held at Cape Coast Castle (Cabo Corso) on the Guinea coast that tried the surviving crew taken from Roberts's ships. Of those brought before it, 74 were acquitted, 52 hanged, and 20 sentenced to seven years' servitude to the Royal African Company; 17 were referred to the Marshalsea in London. It was the largest mass execution of pirates of the Golden Age, a superlative carried at Probable.
  • document A Full and Exact Account of the Tryal of all the Pyrates (1723) (the 1723 trial pamphlet; the Ogle trial account) The printed record of the Cape Coast Castle trial of Roberts's crew, London 1723. It reprints Ogle's dispatch, the indictment, the sworn depositions (including the Porcupine burning), the servitude indentures and the summary tables of verdicts.
  • theme Pirate Articles (The Articles; The Pyrates Articles; pirate code (modern); pirate constitution (modern)) Pirate articles were the sworn, written constitution of a single ship's company, fixing shares, discipline and injury compensation and subscribed by every member. The verbatim article sets survive only in Johnson; the institution of signing and swearing them is confirmed by sworn depositions.
  • theme Quartermasters and Divided Authority (Quarter-Master; Quarter-Mafter; the pirate quartermaster) The pirate quartermaster was an elected officer holding the civil and economic authority of the company and standing as the crew's counterweight to the captain. The office is attested well beyond Johnson, in trial depositions and Snelgrave's firsthand narrative.
  • theme Crew Voting and Councils (the council of the whole company; pirate democracy (modern); shipboard democracy (modern)) Golden Age pirate companies elected and deposed their captains and settled major questions by a vote or council of the whole company. The election speeches and the mock 'House of Lords' are Johnson's; the institution is carried by depositions from four courts across four years.
  • person Woodes Rogers (Captain Woodes Rogers (1712 title page); Woods Rogers (his father's spelling)) Bristol privateer, author of A Cruising Voyage Round the World, and first royal governor of the Bahamas, who broke pirate Nassau.
  • place Nassau / New Providence (New Providence (the island); Charles Town / Charles Towne (the town, to 1684); Providence (period usage for the island)) New Providence island and its north-shore town of Nassau, the pirate haven of the 1710s and the colony Woodes Rogers reclaimed for the Crown in 1718.
  • theme Pirate Pardons (The Act of Grace; The King's Pardon; the King's Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates) The Crown's proclamations of 1717 and 1718, issued under the prerogative and not by Act of Parliament, offering surrendering pirates a pardon for their lives. The two proclamation texts are Confirmed verbatim; the surrender numbers behind them are graded lower.
  • theme The End of the Golden Age (The Suppression of Piracy; The Golden Age of Piracy (the modern label); The Golden Age of Pirates (Fiske 1897)) The suppression of large-scale Atlantic piracy in roughly 1716 to 1726 by a coordinated state programme of law, navy, pardon and exemplary justice, and the modern 'Golden Age' construct itself. The label is a late-Victorian coinage; the events are real.
  • collection The End of the Golden Age (The End of the Golden Age Collection; COL009 (production ID)) The Archives' third Collection: how large-scale Atlantic piracy was brought to an end, not by fading on its own but by a deliberate state programme of four instruments, the pardon, the reformed piracy law, the Royal Navy and the vice-admiralty gallows, and how the age was named by a Victorian historian long after it closed.
  • collection Captain Kidd How did a royal privateer become a politically useful pirate?
  • interpretation Captain Kidd: Political Fall Guy
  • interpretation Was Captain Kidd a Pirate?