Whereas a black flag indicated that they would offer quarter, meaning that they would negotiate when needed," Dr Rebecca Simon, a historian of that era, says. "A red flag meant they would offer no quarter or no mercy. In the 17th century, pirate vessels would hoist flags - but not always the ones we now associate with pirates.
It produces a brilliant red dye that was highly valuable."Īnd pirates liked to be instantly recognisable. "My favourite thing that pirates would steal was a red dye called cochineal that comes from a bug from Oaxaca, Mexico. "There were various other colonial products that were coming out of the Caribbean - sugar and tobacco and things like that," Head says. Head says, with European colonies in the area, "there were also valuables worth taking … the gold and silver that came out of the Spanish mines, for example".īut it wasn't just precious metals that pirates had their eyes on. It was far from Europe, so it took a lot of effort for the various European countries to enforce any kind of law and order," David Head, a history professor at Orlando's University of Central Florida, says.Įdward Teach, known as Blackbeard, was one of the many pirates who would attack ships in the 1700s. The era was known as the 'golden age of piracy'. The golden age of piracyįrom the 1650s until the 1730s, the cutlass-wielding, rum-drinking pirates we know from film and television were indeed roaming around the Caribbean, and then further afield. It struck fear in sailors for decades and helped to define one of the world's most intriguing criminal enterprises. Leeson, a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, who's written a book titled The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, soon realised he was wrong. " more like it should be in a movie, than having been actually used by historical pirates." "When I started studying pirates … I was absolutely certain it was going to be part of pirate lore," he tells ABC RN's An Object in Time.
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