Piracy facts for kids
Piracy is a crime that is committed on ships which are at sea. Pirate is the name given to those people. They usually have small and fast boats. They use these boats to attack other ships, which are usually large cargo ships.
For as long as ships have sailed the sea, there have been pirates. From the Greeks, to the Romans, to the Middle Ages, to the British Empire, there have always been pirates. Sometimes fighting pirates has been one of the most important jobs of a navy.
Modern times
A lot of piracy still happens nowadays in the Gulf of Aden, mostly by Somali pirates. Modern-day pirates usually climb onto ships to get money. In the process, they may kill the crew, or hold them for ransom. In a very few cases, they may also take over the ship and sell its cargo.
The cargo ships that travel the oceans are huge. They usually have very few crew members working on them. Since the ships are so big, they often carry a lot of money in the ship's safe. This money is used to pay the crew, and to pay for the taxes to stay at a port, or to pass through a channel.
Famous pirates
Images for kids
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Mosaic of a Roman trireme in Tunisia
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A fleet of Vikings, painted mid-12th century
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The Vitalienbrüder. Piracy became endemic in the Baltic sea in the Middle Ages because of the Victual Brothers.
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U.S. naval officer Stephen Decatur boarding a Tripolitan gunboat during the First Barbary War, 1804
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1890 illustration by Rafael Monleón of a late 18th-century Iranun lanong warship. The Malay word for "pirate", lanun, originates from an exonym of the Iranun people
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Puerto del Príncipe being sacked in 1668 by Henry Morgan
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Bartholomew Roberts was the pirate with most captures during the Golden Age of Piracy. He is now known for hanging the governor of Martinique from the yardarm of his ship.
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Born to a noble family in Puerto Rico, Roberto Cofresí was the last notably successful pirate in the Caribbean.
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Capture of the Pirate Blackbeard, 1718 depicting the battle between Blackbeard and Robert Maynard in Ocracoke Bay; romanticized depiction by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris from 1920
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Dan Seavey was a pirate on the Great Lakes in the early 20th century.
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Henry Morgan who sacked and burned the city of Panama in 1671 – the second most important city in the Spanish New World at the time; engraving from 1681 Spanish edition of Alexandre Exquemelin's The Buccaneers of America
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Bartholomew Roberts' crew carousing at the Calabar River; illustration from The Pirates Own Book (1837). Roberts is estimated to have captured over 470 vessels.
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Pirate treasure looted by Samuel Bellamy and recovered from the wreck of the Whydah; exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, 2010
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A collage of Somali pirates armed with AKM assault rifles, RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and semi-automatic pistols in 2008
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Incidences of pipeline vandalism by pirates in the Gulf of Guinea, 2002–2011
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British Royal Navy Commodore gives a presentation on piracy at the MAST 2008 conference
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A person costumed in the character of captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's lead role in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series
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