Piracy thread.

>>2947401
My cousin's husband is literally a mercenary that gets hired to stand on cargo liners and shoot at pirates as they round the Horn of Africa. Piracy is a very real thing.

>>2947463
This.

Piracy is actually a big problem around the Indian ocean still.

>>2947401
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Shih

Maybe the end of the "golden age of piracy" for the Eurocentric view, but in China, they still roamed supreme. Infact, I'd say the Golden age of piracy only ended with her.

If I had to guess, I'd say she commanded more pirate ships than the entire European pirate ships combined. But thats just my guess based don the limited scope of the European piracy.

>>2947527
Do you mean more ships than there were European pirates in the Caribbean, European pirates worldwide, or pirates operating in Europe itself?

>>2947684
Golden age of piracy were recorded to have had "thousands of pirates". Some texts estimate there maybe close to 2000 pirates at the height of golden age of piracy.

This is not even 1/10th of the Chinese woman's pirate size.

>>2947751
He said ships, not pirates, not that I disagree with you though. I was just asking him to clear up what he meant by 'European pirates'.

>>2947770
The woman personally commanded 300 ships. There's also other groups operating as her allies and they too command sizable amounts of ships. That's more than any in Europe. Only powerful countries could ever match that number.

To put this in perspective, in ~ late 18th century the french navy had ~290 ships. The Spanish navy had ~200 ships.

The british had ~600 ships.

The total pirate ships operating around from a European origin in 1730 probably amounts of ~150 max. That'd roughly average out to about a dozen crew per ship. That's the max capacity estimate. I'd reckon the actual number is less than 100 ships total due to some portion of pirates staying on land to keep their shady trade business going. Similar to how the Shing Shih had setup operations around the ports so that not all of her 20-40K people were on ships.

>>2947814
a dozen men per ship seems a tad conservative. I've read of pirate crews numbering in the hundreds at the upper end - but I'd have thought a crew of 11 wouldn't make for terribly effective pirating.

>>2947862
Yea, that's why I said max capacity, as in the least amount required to run a pirate ship.

But actual piracy probably took 20+ people, lets say 24. This would give us about 80 pirate ships operating around the time.

>>2947919

I think you are confusing the terms 'minimum' and 'maximum' mate

>>2947919
Do you mean minimum? Also, 24 still seems too low - most pirate ships carried fairly sizeable crews (often quite crammed in comparison to merchant or even naval vessels) to provide prize crews for captured ships.

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>>2947401
There were still ocassional pirate activities in the Carribean until the end of 19th century.

Also who is your favorite pirate /his/? Mine would be Edward Low, the absolute edgemaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Low

>Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described Low as "savage and desperate," and a man of "amazing and grotesque brutality".[3] The New York Times called him a torturer, whose methods would have "done credit to the ingenuity of the Spanish Inquisition in its darkest days".

>Low's fleet captured a Portuguese ship called the Nostra Signiora de Victoria on 25 January 1723. The Victoria's Portuguese captain allowed a bag containing approximately 11,000 gold moidores (worth at the time around £15,000) to fall into the sea rather than see it captured.[19] One of Low's most noted episodes of cruelty followed: in his rage, he slashed off the Portuguese captain's lips with a cutlass, broiled them, and forced the victim to eat them while still hot.[6][19] He then murdered the remaining crew.[1] Low's own men described him as "a maniac and a brute".[16]

>A story describes Low burning a French cook alive, saying he was a "greasy fellow who would fry well", and another tells he once killed 53 Spanish captives with his cutlass.[6] Some historians, including David Cordingly, believe this was deliberately done to cultivate a ferocious image.[23] Historian Edward Leslie described Low as a psychopath with a history filled with "mutilations, disembowelings, decapitations, and slaughter".

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>>2948051
Jean Lafitte operated as a pirate, privateer and smuggler in the Gulf of Mexico in the 19th century. He had a pirate nest in Barataria Bay outside of Louisiana.