>>16471517>>16471544>>16471545Being a pirate should be very good.
>The Golden Age Pirates were distinct from both the buccaneers of Morgan’s generation and the pirates who preceded them. In contrast with the buccaneers, they were notorious outlaws, regarded as thieves and criminals by every nation, including their own. Unlike their pirate predecessors, they were engaged in more than simple crime and undertook nothing less than a social and political revolt. They were sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves rebelling against their oppressors: captains, ship owners, and the autocrats of the great slave plantations of America and the West Indies>Dissatisfaction was so great aboard merchant vessels that typically when the pirates captured one, a portion of its crew enthusiastically joined their ranks. Even the Royal Navy was vulnerable; when HMS Phoenix confronted the pirates at their Bahamian lair in 1718, a number of the frigate’s sailors defected, sneaking off in the night to serve under the black flag. Indeed, the pirates’ expansion was fueled in large part by the defections of sailors, in direct proportion to the brutal treatment in both the navy and merchant marine>Not all pirates were disgruntled sailors. Runaway slaves migrated to the pirate republic in significant numbers, as word spread of the pirates attacking slave ships and initiating many aboard to participate as equal members of their crews. At the height of the Golden Age, it was not unusual for escaped slaves to account for a quarter or more of a pirate vessel’s crew, and several mulattos rose to become full-fledged pirate captains. This zone of freedom threatened the slave plantation colonies surrounding the Bahamas. In 1718, the acting governor of Bermuda reported that the “negro men [have] grown so impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their rising [against us and]... fear their joining with the pirates.” 