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Pirate Havens in the Golden Age of Piracy

The buccaneers who roamed the Spanish Main and the pirates who plundered the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean during the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) needed a place of refuge where they could share out and enjoy their loot. Pirate havens like Port Royal on Jamaica, Tortuga on Hispaniola, and New Providence in the Bahamas provided safe harbours, the possibility to sell looted cargo to crooked traders, and were within easy reach of the main shipping routes. As the colonial authorities finally got a grip on piracy from 1720 onwards, so the pirate havens declined, many of them becoming a pirate’s very last port of call: the place of their execution.

Saturday in the city of Nassau