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A pirate is one who robs or plunders at sea without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation. Pirates usually target other ships, but have also attacked targets on shore. These acts are known as piracy. Unlike the stereotypical pirate with cutlass and masted sailing ship, today most pirates get about in speedboats wearing face masks instead of bandanas, using AK-47s rather than cutlasses.
The concept of taking someone else's possessions and using them for your own pleasure or profit has been extended so that the term piracy also commonly refers to trademark and copyright infringement or unauthorized copying of software.
Pirates who operated in the West Indies were known as buccaneers. The word comes from from boucan, a wooden frame used for cooking meat (called a barbacoa elsewhere). These were used by French hunters called boucaniers. These hunters became pirates and took their name with them.
Dutch pirates were known as vrijbuiters ("plunderers"), combining the words vrij meaning free, buit meaning loot, and the ending -er meaning agent. The word vrijbuiter was corrupted into the English freebooters and French flibustiers. It came back into English as filibusters, who were not pirates, but adventurers involving themselves in Latin American revolution s and coups and then finally came to mean the disruptive parlimentary maneuver of talking without stopping.
Pirates are called Lanun by both the Indonesians and the Malaysians who form the nations bracketing the Straits of Malacca. Originally a culture of seafaring people, their name became synonymous with piracy in the 15th century.
See also piracy in the CaribbeanThe great era of piracy in the Caribbean extends from around 1560 up until the 1720s. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1640s until the 1680s. Piracy in the Caribbean came out of the interplay of larger national trends.. Pirates with commissions from a government are called privateers or corsairCorsair can refer to: a pirate who used to operate in the Mediterranean Sea a French airline, see: Corsair (airline) several aircraft: the F4U Corsair the A-7 Corsair II a kind of fireworks a poem, The Corsair, by Lord Byron.s, which in modern Arabic is قرصان from the Turkish Korsan, which seems to have been derived from the European word.
Main article: PrivateerA privateer is a private ship (or its captain) authorized by a country's government to attack and seize cargo from another country's ships. Prior to the development of international law among European nations, there was no legal recourse for minor grievan.
A privateer or corsair was similar in method but had a commission or a letter of marqueA letter of marque and reprisal was an official warrant or commission from a national government authorizing the designated agent to search, seize, or destroy specified assets or personnel belonging to a party which had committed some offense under the la from a government or king to capture merchant ships belonging to an enemy nation. The famous Barbary CorsairsThough at least a proportion of them are better described as privateers the Barbary pirates operated out of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Sale and ports in Morocco, preying on shipping in the western Mediterranean Sea from the time of the Crusades until the ea of the Mediterranean were privateers, as were the Maltese Corsairs , who were authorized by the Knights of St. John. The letter of marque was recognized by convention and meant that a privateer could not be charged with piracy although this was often not enough to save them. Seven nations agreed to suspend the use of the letter of marque under the Declaration of ParisThe Declaration of Paris from April 16, 1856 was issued to abolish privateering. External links Wikisource:Declaration of Paris full document 19th_century_historical_documents Piracy. of 1854 while the United States and Spain represent two nations who have explicitly reserved the right of commissioning letters of marque and reprisal. The most famous corsair was Sir Francis Drake and England was the main nation in promoting them.
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