Jolly Roger / Pirate Gear

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:::: PIRATES! 'Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest / Drink and the devil had done for the rest!...' Treasure Island , Robert Louis Stevenson's story (1883) of peglegs, parrots and buried gold has forever immortalized the cutthroat world of piracy on the Spanish Main. Some of the lore is pure fun & fiction, like 'walking the plank' - as Captain Hook (an Etonian gone wrong) did in Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). As well there have been countless other pirate stories created by writers, artists, musicians and Hollywood in particular, thanks to swashbuckling heroes of the silver screen such as Errol Flynn, Geena Davis, Johnny Depp, etc.). But actual pirates DID exist!... and they were especially dangerous for Atlantic and Caribbean merchant vessels during the European colonial expansion era of the1600's and 1700's. Much of the lore surrounding these real-life troublemakers was in fact true; Prior to becoming pirates and embarking on their chosen lives of lawlessness, many had already been skilled, professional sailors... many with formal naval training and years of experience in seamanship, navigation and weaponry. And so notwithstanding the apparent informalities of a carefree, drunk and disorderly kind of sailor/outlaw lifestyle, pirates had their own kind of disciplines and incentives. They were were often described as "cunning, formidable, and potentially lethal adversaries who would stop at nothing to employ their boundless acts of high seas treachery." Some even functioned as a collective, organizing themselves into small flotillas or groups of ships to inflict maximum terror upon their prey... a sort of trade union of rum guzzling baddies. Pirate (or sometimes, "pyrate"): Outlaw of the sea. Thief, robber, kidnapper... sometimes smuggler. The word "piracy" is still the legal and most current term to describe any act of attacking and forcefully robbing another ship. Some of the most notorious real-life pirates from history would include Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Ca

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