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Hello. Welcome to the Pirate History Podcast. My name is Matt. Thank you for listening.

I don't like to repeat myself, or rather I know that it's annoying for a lot of you when I do.

So generally I try to avoid it, but I have to remember that every episode could be somebody's first episode.

Beyond that, today we're going to look at some of the first really notable moves of the Golden Age of Piracy.

With that in mind, I'd like to ask one last time with feeling, what is the Golden Age of Piracy?

The phrase probably originated in Captain Charles Johnson's a general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pirates.

And there's a very real possibility that when writing that phrase, Captain Johnson was joking, being facetious, you know, tongue in cheek.

I'm trying to say he was being a smart ass. A Golden Age, as people at the time would have understood it, almost certainly referred to the height of the Roman Empire.

When culture and power and art and literature and military might, territorial expansion, all of the metrics of civilization were at their greatest extent.

A few hundred dirty, drunken, anarchist, nomadic sea robbers hardly equate to that.

But even so, even if he were joking, the Golden Age of Piracy has become kind of a shorthand.

For a period of time in the early modern era, in which pirates represented a threat to the stability of European trade and profits and expansion.

But exactly what period of time the Golden Age of Piracy represents is something of a lingering question.

The broadest possible definition includes the whole of the age of sale from Francis Strait all the way to the Napoleonic era.

Slightly more conservative definitions will begin with Henry Morgan and the brethren of the coast and take that to about the 1720s.

The most restrictive definitions would focus almost exclusively on the pirate-republic at Nassau.

However, most historians and writers choose the definition that we're going to use here today.

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