ABSTRACT
Contemporaries referred to shipboard life as the “wooden world,” and the men who inhabited it experienced extremes of personal autonomy and subordination. By 1700, with British naval power commanding much of the Atlantic, a new breed of pirates known as freebooters emerged, sailing under no particular flag and attacking ships and seaboard settlements indiscriminately. The Pirate has liberty to go when he pleases, either to hunt, or fish, or about any other divertisements of his pleasure; but withal is not to commit any hostility, or depredation upon the inhabitants, seeing the Indians bring him in all that he stands in need of, or that he desires. As the British Navy cracked down on piracy in the Atlantic during the early eighteenth century, many pirates were tried and executed in colonial seaports, where their corpses were left to hang as a warning to other sailors.
