Pirates of Colonial North Carolina

Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Black Bart; pirates have an infamous reputation. Treasure Island and Disney movies have depicted pirates as men living in fraternal conditions aboard their ships, fighting against wrongs and following some noble cause. The reality was different from these fictional representations; they were little more than the dregs and scum of the seaports of the world. They terrorized merchants and navies across the globe whilst flying under the Black Flag and were little different to ruthless gangsters of the twenty-first century. Hugh F. Rankin’s examines the lives and stories of the pirates that plagued the coast of North Carolina during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rankin’s work begins with examining who exactly were pirates and how piracy had developed, before giving an in-depth look at some of the more prominent pirates of North Carolina, like Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard. The “Golden Age of Piracy” largely ended with the death of Blackbeard, yet some bandit continued to raid for a number of years afterwards, and so Rankin explains how piracy was eventually eradicated along the coast of North America in the eighteenth century. The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina is a fascinating work that tells a very different, but equally entertaining, story to those told of pirates in movies and novels. Hugh F. Rankin was an American historian who focused his research upon colonial America. He spent most of his career teaching at Tulane University. He wrote, cowrote and edited sixteen books through the course of his life. The Pirates of Colonial North Carolina was first published in 1960 and Rankin passed away in 1989.