New England Pirates

During the Golden Age of Piracy, New England was far more than a battleground against buccaneers — it was their business partner. For roughly 75 years beginning in the mid-17th century, pirates in colonial America were not merely tolerated but actively embraced as a source of commerce and influence. Governors, port officers, sheriffs, merchants, and city leaders across the region found it profitable to look the other way — or to open the door entirely. The pirate history of New England is, in many ways, the story of a society that chose profit over principle.

Piracy was seen as a way to boost the local economy and keep seafaring men employed. Colonial privateering in New England during England’s wars with France and Spain also brought legitimate-seeming profit to port cities — and blurred the line between legal privateer and outright pirate. The Navigation Acts, which England imposed in the early 1690s to restrict colonial trade, gave merchants every reason to find goods through other channels — legal or otherwise.

In this article: Rhode Island pirates / New York pirates / Boston pirates

Pirates Needed could have been the heading of many ‘Help Wanted’ ads in Rhode Island during the second half of the 17th century. Newport and Providence were so openly welcoming that they became prime recruiting and resting grounds for some of the most notorious pirates of the age — among them William Kidd, Blackbeard, Henry Every, and Rhode Island’s own Thomas Tew.

Thomas Tew, Newport’s native son and one of colonial America’s most celebrated pirates, returned home in 1694 after a legendary and hugely profitable raid on Red Sea merchant ships. His friendship with New York’s corrupt Governor Benjamin Fletcher proved fateful: Fletcher sold Tew a letter of marque — a privateer’s license — for what would become his final voyage to Madagascar and the Indian Ocean.

By the 1690s, Rhode Island’s legal system had become a revolving door for accused pirates, offering little more justice than the mock trials the men reportedly held for sport. English trade officials eventually petitioned the Crown to revoke Rhode Island’s charter, and local leaders were pressured into reform. Piracy’s grip on the colony loosened as the 1700s brought more legitimate merchant trade to the region — and with it, more to lose. By the early 1720s, the era had ended sharply: 26 pirates were hanged outside Newport.

If Rhode Island offered pirates a haven, colonial New York offered something more sophisticated: a fully organized system of corrupt commerce. Piracy thrived in early New York City largely because of Governor Benjamin Fletcher, one of colonial America’s most notorious pirate-friendly officials and the kingpin of a sprawling network of complicit merchants, port authorities, and city leaders.

Pirate ships paid a set fee per man to anchor in the harbor, after which their plundered goods passed through customs without a whisper of objection. Once ashore, any pirate could freely buy gunpowder, provisions, and alcohol while strolling the streets with something close to celebrity status.

Fletcher fed London a steady stream of assurances that he was cracking down on piracy — all while hosting Thomas Tew for dinner. When the truth reached England, he was removed from office in 1698. Among his circle was local merchant captain Captain William Kidd, who was dispatched to privateer against French ships during the Anglo-French war and whose story would become one of the most dramatic in pirate history.

New York investors even bought shares in voyages to resupply pirate outposts — men like Adam Baldridge, who had made himself a trading king off the coast of Madagascar. Citizens who railed against pirates publicly thought nothing of buying their goods in the next alley over. The Navigation Acts had made hypocrites of nearly everyone.

New York had refined colonial piracy into its most efficient form during the Golden Age of Piracy — but the system collapsed as England replaced corrupt governors, strengthened its navy, and began holding fast trials at sea rather than in distant London. Swift executions followed. By the 1730s, the merchants of New York had quietly forgotten their old suppliers, replaced by a growing tide of legitimate trade ships.

Boston’s relationship with piracy was more ambivalent than Newport’s or New York’s — but no less tangled. The city welcomed “plate ships” carrying gold supposedly recovered from sunken wrecks, though the suspicious timing of those sinkings raised eyebrows in some quarters. Pardons for convicted pirates could be quietly purchased, and in one remarkable case, two men convicted of piracy were released to fight in a local colonial war against Native Americans. The waters off Cape Cod also claimed one of the era’s most storied wrecks: the Whydah, flagship of Samuel Bellamy, lost in a storm in 1717.

In July 1703, Governor Joseph Dudley dispatched Captain Daniel Plowman under a privateering license to raid French and Spanish vessels. Quartermaster Anthony Holding recruited John Quelch to assemble a crew — a surly lot who promptly voted Quelch captain after locking the ailing Plowman in his own quarters. The 80-ton Charles went on to seize a substantial haul from Portuguese ships in Brazilian waters. When the crew returned to Boston, the authorities were waiting. Holding vanished, but Quelch and several others were convicted and hanged outside the city in June 1704 — the conclusion of what many considered the most sensational pirate trial in colonial America up to that point.

Edward Low, a Boston pirate whose brief career became one of the most brutal in the entire Golden Age of Piracy, met his end on the gallows and was gibbeted at Nick’s Mate Island in Boston Harbor on July 12, 1726.

Boston also holds a remarkable footnote in American pirate history through Rachel Wall, widely considered the first American-born female pirate. A Pennsylvania girl who had taken work as a maid in Boston, Wall went to sea with her husband George, and the couple turned to piracy along the New England coast. Their run ended when a storm claimed George and most of the crew. Rachel survived, returned to her maid’s post, and might have lived out her days in obscurity — until she was arrested for robbing a woman of a bonnet. She confessed to her years at sea as a female pirate, but it was the theft on land that sent her to the gallows in September 1789, the last woman hanged in Massachusetts.