A digital museum of the Golden Age of Piracy
Sailing the Black Flag
The Archives
The evidence and the legend, and which is which.
The Collections
Three Collections are open
How a privateer became a pirate, how the pirates became a war, and how the war ended the age.
Collection I
Captain Kidd
At William Kidd's trial, the documents that could have carried his defence were not in the courtroom. The government had them. The jury never saw them. Nine rooms, from a royal commission to Execution Dock, with the evidence in view the whole way.
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Collection II
Bartholomew Roberts and the Pirate War
How did the most successful pirate crew of the age govern itself, and what did it take to destroy it? Eight rooms, from an election off the African coast to the largest mass execution of the pirate Golden Age.
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Collection III
The End of the Golden Age
Nine rooms trace the machinery that closed the Golden Age: the pardon, the governor, the law and the gallows, ending with the man who named the age long after it was over.
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Letters from the curator
The Archives and the book behind it, Sailing the Black Flag, come from the same years in the records. Subscribe for occasional letters from the curator: each new Collection and document as it opens, the evidence behind it, and the first news of the book as it heads for publication.
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Step straight into the catalogue
Themes across the Archives
The ideas that run across the Collections, with the surviving evidence, competing interpretations and later legends kept distinct.
The method
Every claim carries its evidence. The museum is built from trial records, commissions, depositions, correspondence and contemporary print. Published claims lead back to their sources. Where accounts conflict, or the record falls silent, the uncertainty stays visible on the page.