Pirates are maritime bandits who prey on other ships, rob sailors of their goods, and sometimes capture the ship itself for their own purposes. Piracy flourished across the
Guerreros, particularly in the
Lucayans, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
"When the queen brands us pyrates, she doesn't mean to make us adversaries. She doesn't mean to make us criminals. She means to make us monsters. For that's the only way her god-fearing, tax-paying subjects can make sense of men who keep what is theirs and fear no one. When I say there's a war coming, I don't mean with the Scarborough, I don't mean with Queen Catherine or Avalon. Civilization is coming. And it means to exterminate us."— James Flint
History
By 1715, pirates virtually ruled the Lucayans, capturing and pillaging merchant ships of all nationalities. The absence of effective law enforcement and the natural disorder of the Guerreros created an atmosphere of opportunistic and independent-minded fortune-seekers. While many pirates did not consider themselves to have a home country, many in the Lucayans used
Nassau, Providence Island, as a home port between their times at sea. Pirates also found havens near Massachusetts and Philadelphia, and in
Kingsport and Tortuga.
Unlike Western societies of the time, many Guerrerian pirate crews operated as limited democracies. Pirate communities were some of the first to instate systems of checks and balances similar to those used by modern democracies today. The first record of such a government aboard a pirate sloop dates to the seventeenth century.
