The fifth is a pirate which had recently plundered on the Guinea coast. The third and fourth are of a captured Spanish merchantman soon to be converted by flibustiers to piracy, and its captor. The first two are Spanish-built pirate/privateer half-galleys, one for certain, the other almost certain. Additionally, there is an illustration of two others that is almost certainly based on eyewitness descriptions taken firsthand by the illustrator. In other words, they are illustrations of real buccaneer or pirate vessels made by illustrators and painters who actually saw them or were provided a high degree of detail by eyewitnesses. Nonetheless, there exist eyewitness illustrations of at least five Golden Age sea roving vessels we can for the most part put names, captains, and adventures to. But conjectural they are, even if they are the best we might ever do. At best they are intelligently conjectural. Modern scholarly reconstructions in the form of illustration or model - Whydah, Queen Anne’s Revenge, &c - are based on limited eyewitness accounts and scarce records of the actual ships, with reference to hopefully similar ships found in period maritime paintings, drawings, and construction records. There were no professional artists such as the Willem van de Velde father and son, or Pierre Puget, or any of a number of maritime painters of the era to paint the Caribbean and its people, landscapes, and vessels. These artists never saw the vessels they drew, probably had little if any input from eyewitnesses who had seen them, and were often clearly inept when it came to accurate representation (Hollywood also has always often had this problem and still does).Įven when the illustrator had a good description, the result often hit far from the mark, as we’ll see below. Most period images of buccaneer and pirate ships, not mention of pirate prey and pirate hunters, were drawn not by eyewitnesses in the Caribbean or in other places pirates roved but in England and Europe by the professional illustrators of various editions of books on buccaneers and pirates. In fact, there are few eyewitness images of actual buccaneer and pirate ships of this era - perhaps no more than five! Modern histories of so-called Golden Age pirates - those circa 1655 to 1730 - are often filled with images of pirate ships, many of which are implied to be accurate representations.
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