Should Pirates ever be strong enough to regularly challenge national navy's in open battle?

>they only attacked Muslim ships

That's not true and they got a lot of shit from Christian monarchs because of it. They were bad asses though. Still fucked up of a lot of goat fuckers.

The united states participated in two little things called the Barbary Pirate Wars so its not as fantastical as you think

Read "The Scar" by China Melville.

What you're describing is pretty much how warring states-era Japanese pirates worked. Some grew to the point that they were feudal samurai clans in their own right, who would patrol shipping routes, levee fees against ships passing through, and attack those who tried to skirt them. They would also ally with other clans, essentially becoming the de facto navies of different warring factions.

Already happened in real life so it's definitely possible in a roleplay game.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Shih

Ah yes, the 'fearsome' Chinese pirates...

Depends on the era. Sir Francis Drake was essentially a pirate and the Vikings grew into the great fleets like the Hanseatic League.

That does not describe piracy at all. The British Royal Navy practiced impressment but they were no pirates.

Ching Shih fucked up China's navy, the Dutch navy and the East India Company's private navy at the same time.
They had to give her a sovereign island casino and write off all her crimes to convince her to leave them alone and that was when she was already an old woman.

The term "pirate" basically refers to someone who robs and ransacks for their own personal benefit (without having a commission from any sovereign nation).

As soon as they are endorsed by a government or sovereign nation, they cease to be pirates. At this point, they are privateers, or, in a more militaristic role, they are raiders.

It all boils down to purpose.

I think you're just looking at a kingdom of stinky unwashed raider assholes. Which isn't a bad idea.

Henry Morgan pretty much took Jamaica from England and Panama from Spain. And neither could do shit about it.

>Should Pirates ever be strong enough to regularly challenge national navy's in open battle?
They shouldn't, but then again French police shouldn't be afraid to enter parts of Paris either.

>Henry Morgan pretty much took Jamaica from England
Wasn't that entirely accidental?

>Ah yes, the 'fearsome' Chinese pirates...

3 years in command of the largest pirate fleet ever assembled, and in those 3 years took more loot than any Caribbean pirate (arguably more than ALL of them combined); and at the end of those 3 years retired, kept all of her loot, and opened a gambling house, living another 34 years until she died at age 69 in 1844.

That she lost the Battle of the Tiger's Mouth doesn't do a damn thing to diminish the impressiveness of Ching Shih or the Red Flag Fleet.

It's just one of those nights. You're at the pub for a round with your mates, you have a few beers to much and the next morning you wake up in a bedroom you don't know with a woman you've never seen before and suddenly a bunch of natives declare you their king and the Spanish, the British, the French and the Dutch are all out for your head. We've all been there, right?

Her entire fleet was defeated by three (3) ships, which then blockaded all of them in until they surrendered and renounced piracy.

Chinese pirates were fishing boat tier, they couldn't fuck with frigates, and they did not attack the colonial powers outside of a few merchantmen. I'd have more to say, but every webpage I find about this is full of more bullshit and hyperbolae than the last. No surprise, since this kind of thing gets coverage from shitheap publications like Cracked

Accidental from the governor's perspective, maybe. Morgan organized the buccaneers with the explicit intent of taking over Port Royal and then convinced the governor to invite them in as his private army against the spaniards.
Ooops, Jamaica is now pirate terrotory.
Panama wasn't accidental at all, it was a classic bait and switch sending unmanned ships to "capture" the fleet and capturing the treasury and armory instead while the spaniards were away fighting with ghosts.

Pirates shouldn't have much chance against a trained and equipped navy.
But the ocean is huge, and ideally there's plenty of uncharted territory to hide in.

Are we counting pirates as different than privateers?

One defeat doesn't erase dozens of victories, specially when you get to keep all your shit, your own island and live in luxury till you die of old age.

Are you now gonna say Bartholomew Roberts taking 400 ships in under 4 years doesn't mean shit because he was cheap shot by a nobody? Or that Cortez didn't conquer the largest city in America because he had to retreat after Alvarado fucked up?

Quite a lot of pirates were the trained and equipped navy who just swapped flags and ports.
And Port Royal got to be as rich as London and Toledo from 1660 to 1690.

I agree with most of what you said, but Cortez's success rides on him arriving in a time of political conflict among the Aztecs, and smallpox.

Really mostly just the smallpox if you think about it. Even getting mistaken by a god just puts you in a very precarious situation once they decide you aren't a god. And all the tribes who helped him overthrow the Aztecs would have turned on him if they had a chance.

As it happened, he would not have escaped Tenochtitlan had the locals not been dying of a smallpox epidemic Cortez wasn't even aware he had started. He was boxed in and the new Emporor wasn't incompetent like Montezuma was.

>However there were the barbary pirates, which operated out of small islamic coastal cities and terrorized the mediterranean shipping. The rulers of those cities weren't pirates
Barbarossa was certainly a pirate and a ruler. I'm sure a lot more like him existed, just not as legendary.

There's been more than a few cases where captured privateers suddenly found their letters of marque 'lost' or 'obviously a fake' (ie. ripped up in front on them) and promptly hanged as pirates.

Then months later when they news gets back to the nation who issued the letter, they just shrug and starts handing out more letters of marque like candy.

Point being... you can argue you're a privateer all you want but most of time your victims don't give a shit and your back either can't do anything in time to help or don't actually care about anything except pissing off the enemy nation.

Smallpox was more prevalent in the conquest of Peru than the conquest of Mexico. Most of the pox in Mexico happened after Cortez' retreat from Tenochtitlan, which happened because Alvarado killed Moctezuma and his brother Cuitlahuac sieged the city. In fact Cuitlahuac was the first notable native to die of smallpox 80 days after the siege of Tenochtitlan.
It is speculated that the pox arrived to America on Panfilo de Narvaez' boat in may 1520, the same year and just four months before Cuitlahuac's death.

That was before China industrialized and well after Europe did.

are you implying France is the only city ever with places that cops are afraid to enter?

True, but two points:
- If the letters were never honoured, pirates wouldn't use them. Generally, the letter was useful because all of the friendly navy's waters could be used as a safe haven.
- Nations angling for a conflict could use the "unlawful seizure" of a friendly vessel as casus belli or at least a diplomatic tool. This made prosecuting privateers more complicated from time to time, though mostly by restricting counter-piracy efforts more than saving individual necks from nooses.

My setting has this. The pirate isle is too far away for the empire to reach and they would have to cross through enemy waters. The other nations are either divided or allow the pirates their isle because they mess with the empires navy and thus weaken them. There are pirate lords that are above all other pirates and command their own fleets, however they are elected by the captains under them commanding their fleets. There has not been a pirate king for some years though because pirate lords are happier not answering to anyone, and no one will vote for anyone but themselves. It can work but you have to lay out all the powers and see why someone wouldn't just decide they are too much of a nuisance and take care of them. Maybe they have powerful illusionists that hide their ships from sight until it is too late making them impossible to track/fight.

There wasn't an outbreak in Tenochtitlan when Cortez was trying to break out?

Either way, Moctezuma was more incompetent than Cortez was competent, and the colonization of the new world would have been nigh impossible without a Smalpox epidemic. You'd have European merchant republics trading with native tribes that slowly modernize.

By the 20th century, the Unified Nations of Turtle Island are allied with the Kingdom of Hawaii and the empire of Japan against the USSR which controls most of Eurasia. The East India company is all that's left of the British empire and is the shifty third party playing both superpowers off each other.

I think it's a case of 'last line of defense'. I'm sure the letter did save 'some' privateers... but probably not many...

And it's like you say: letter does = safe harbour

Basically all I'm saying just because technically some's a privateer, it doesn't mean they won't be hang and eventually remembered in official history as a pirate.

No, pirates and other banditry thrive on the element of surprise and underhanded tactics. It's not in their interest to directly confront their opponents, especially when said opponents are trained soldiers.

No, the smallpox outbreak in Tenochtitlan happened almost a year after Cuitlahuac's death when Cortez and his reagrouped army returned to the city after fighting Narvaez's people in Veracruz. And a lot of spaniards from Cortez' troops also got sick while fighting Narvaez but they knew how to treat it.
The outbreak wasn't what forced Cuahutemoc (the third and last Mexica ruler during the conquest) to give up the city either, it was the spaniards cutting the flow of water into the city.

Pirates are a myth

>the city of France

At first they only attacked Islamic shipping, but started "inspecting" Christian shipping under the pretense of suspicion that they were smuggling for the Ottomans. Eventually they just said "fuck it, we're pirates"

Yeah, but to be fair, the Barbary Pirates got their shit pushed in and it was one of the first acts of badassery in our national history.

>To the shores of Tripoli

if you're a nation that subsists off of maritime plunder, I guess?

this sounds like a great idea for the start to a campaign...

>British Royal Navy practiced impressment but they were no pirates.
See Drake might only sometimes be a member of the Royal Navy, but he sure acted like a damn pirate

>doesn't mean they won't be hang and eventually remembered in official history as a pirate.
Of course, during the revolution, the us used a version of privateers, but then, the British can only hang you once

Eventually they'd just give up being pirates and focus on running their nation because piracy is dangerous, risky work. Its a giant fucking gamble half the time. That could be interesting actually, a pirate haven caught in the middle of its transition between pirates and legitimate businessmen and the struggle between factions who either support or oppose such an idea.

Why prosecute? Most of these seizures would've happened on the open sea. Bind the captives, put them in the hold, take any valuables, then fire the ship.

>Should Pirates ever be strong enough to regularly challenge national navy's in open battle?
rarely but yes it should be possible

>Should they ever have their own populace of either slaves or freemen chopping wood, working drydocks, and repairing stolen ships to grow a fleet?

this happens all the time in a lot of fantasy settings, and it happened IRL

>How fantastical would it be for a "Pirate King" to be recognized by actual kingdoms enough to try and offer diplomacy and tribute for protection or mercenary aide?

it wouldn't be awesome at all, pirates are scumbags.

Woodes Rodgers pls.

If anyone in this thread can prove to me pirates exist I will PayPal them $50

but they can't because pirates are a hollywood myth

They aren't. Read your history idiot.

>A general history of the pyrates
>published 1724 in britain
BOOM.

Depends on setting

history.com/news/8-real-life-pirates-who-roved-the-high-seas

Keep you're money, spend it on a history book.

>The whole fucking point of piracy is about being stronger than local navy.
That's an odd way to phrase "The merchant shipping isn't protected and thus is vulnerable to being raided."

Wut

Posting best pirate king. Silver wishes he was as badass as Flint.

>And fighting against navy openly? Who's going to shelter you, then? It's not like ships are all the same and you can just slip into some port by flying different colours

Well, it's not like they had radio, transponders or coastal radar back in the day.

Besides, whats the likelihood of great power rival not-France helping arch-nemesis not-England and not-Spain track down some stolen vessels?

>history.com
>history channel
Same fucking company also says aliens intervened in the ancient world. Why the fuck should I listen to them?

Pirates as we know them are an invention of Robert Louis Stevenson. I'm not saying nobody ever stole a boat or attacked freighters off the coast of Mogadishu but pirates as discussed in this thread are a fucking myth.

Once again
>A general history of the pyrates; 1724
>Treasure Island; 1882

>Same fucking company also says aliens intervened in the ancient world. Why the fuck should I listen to them?
Okay, how 'bout a non-profit organisation, then, faggot?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_in_the_Caribbean

OTOH, yeah - pirates like Silver didn't really exist.
Most Pirates were actually fucking cowards and wouldn't dare fight at anything less than 10-to-1 odds.
Exactly like Vikings, really.
Except most of the public doesn't like to hear this, and is all about 'muh heroes' bullshit.

Port Royal was literally New York with sugar cane plantations a year before it quaked into the sea.

>Most Pirates were actually fucking cowards and wouldn't dare fight at anything less than 10-to-1 odds.

They're not there to fight, but to rob. Fighting is for retards and soldiers.

This. Pirates aren't navies, they're muggers but at sea. Attacking naval warships isn't profitable, attacking merchant shipping is.

Imagine you're a carjacker and you have a highway traversed almost exclusively by military APCs, 18-wheelers hauling valuable and typically untraceable cargo, and maybe the odd civilian car here or there. Which would you focus on stealing?

>Wikipedia
You mean that site edited by retarded anons who don't know what they're talking about? I can go there right now and write that space aliens came down to Earth and gave the "pirates" advanced warships and it doesn't make it true.

>They're not there to fight, but to rob. Fighting is for retards and soldiers.
Exactly - there's no profit in being dead.

>ou mean that site edited by retarded anons who don't know what they're talking about? I can go there right now and write that space aliens came down to Earth and gave the "pirates" advanced warships and it doesn't make it true.
And the post would be up for 5 whole seconds before you got perma-banned for not providing a proven, verifiable source.
Here's your sign.

gay
gaaaaaay
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

>Except most of the public doesn't like to hear this, and is all about 'muh heroes' bullshit.
IIRC Jack Sparrow was never in any fight where he didn't have an upper hand by his own free will.
Even in fiction pirates are cowards and opportunists. The only brave man in 300 years of classic piracy was Black Bart and he may or may not have had a death wish and histrionic personality disorder.

Oh yeah he was a flaming homo, but he was still one of the best parts of the show.

Could there be the conditions for a golden age of piracy in diesel ships and propeller aircraft times? Or did the equipment simply require too much logistical support to keep running?

Maybe if something like World War One resulted in a nuclear war level of devastation, the survivors would have plenty of war surplus, and the rest of the world would have food and shelter.

I personally enjoyed the brutal nature of Vanes. Too bad he was done in by a vagina.

>Could there be the conditions for a golden age of piracy in diesel ships and propeller aircraft times?
Literally Louissianna.
Of course at a much smaller scale and with hooverboats harassing ships.

Vane died like a man at least? But I liked Jack more than Vane, especially in the last couple of seasons when he got back on the ocean.

gcaptain.com/ransom-paid-somali-pirates-release/

Not sure if legit and too lazy to look it up, but I'd believe it.

It could happen. Once. For one brief, horrifying moment in the grand fabric of time the Pirates will have the upper hand. But this is untenable, and they will slowly be destroyed. They just can't compete with legit government forces for long, and if they could they wouldn't be Pirates. It'd just be a regular war between states.

The fuck is you sayin BITCH?

you are a silly

>regularly challenge national navy's in open battle?
Ignoring some fairly dubious history in this thread, you have to remember a few things:
1) major increases in piracy occurred after the end of a major war (the end of the religious wars in Europe leading to the Buccaneering period, the end of the war of Spanish Succession leading to the early 18th century piracy that informs our modern sense of pirates, the marked increase in piracy from the Barbary coast after Tripoli and Algiers became administered by the Ottomans), where large number of sailors for national navies became unemployed.

2) Even in their most prolific era, European piracy in the Carribean and on the Pirate round was a very short period of time: each spurt lasting less than 10 years, and shorter each time. Barbary pirates, of course, enjoyed longer success, but they too were eventually stopped by:

3) By the early-to-mid 18th century piracy was beginning to actually become problematic to most of the colonial powers; they could no longer turn a blind eye to privateers preying on 'enemy' shipping, especially as Spanish fortunes dwindled after Utrecht. By about 1730 Caribbean pirates were essentially gone, and the most Barbary pirates were stamped out by the end of the Napoleonic wars a century later.

tl;dr: It's pretty fantastical. To have a pirate navy capable of challenging a nation that seeks blue-water capable navies, your 'pirate king' would just have to be that: a king, of a kingdom capable of doing all the agriculture and industry required to maintain that navy.

Dude, late 40's southern murrika was filled with pompous "new rich" retards who thought parading their newly aquired jewelry-clad trophy wives through the bayou in a ferry was a good idea.
It also coincided with the boom of airboat popularity in the area.

A pirate king is by its nature a paradox. A pirate is a criminal, an outlaw, illegitimate. A king is a monarch, he IS the law, he is legitimate. So if you take both pirate and king as literal and contemporaneous terms (i.e. not a pirate who later became a king), then obviously not, it's self-contradictory.

Therefore one or the other of the two words must therefore be less than literal.

If by a "pirate king" you mean a merely particularly powerful criminal leader who isn't literally royalty, then sure, such a thing not only could exist but arguably did in many historical examples.

If by "pirate king" you mean a monarch, a royal ruler, who supported piracy or committed criminal acts, then sure, such a thing not only could exist but arguably did in many historical examples.

Then set the game during those ten years. I'm sure everyone who was a pirate and not an idiot knew that the game would eventually be over, and the real game was making sure you had legal property when everything went back to normal. Make THAT the game. It really is all about hiding treasure for when you'll be able to spend it. And grabbing other peoples treasure. In real life it was more political, but in a game it could be just about buried treasure on one hand, and selling out to the Crown on the other hand.

What if two kings say the other isn't legitimate?

Was the Emperor of China a pirate pretending to be a king, or a king who supported piracy, or was it the Emperor of China?

>Port Royal was literally New York
It should be noted that the Port Royal earthquake in 1692 was a major contributor to the decline of the buccaneering era of Caribbean piracy, which was, of course, about 30 years too early for most depictions of pirates in our modern conception.

Also, New York was a pirate haven itself during the Pirate Round period of the mid 1690s, especially after the end of Eighty Years War in 1648 that led to the Navigation Acts, restricting trade to the English colonies.

Go read Nathaniel's Nutmeg, there's a part if it detailing captain Michelborne and a number of his crew fighting off a number of Japanese pirates on his ship "Tiger" in 1604. Using pikes because they had butchered the men trying to prepare muskets and the crew of the tiger couldn't access their firearms

Which one actually rules? The other is a pretender - he may have a legal claim (whether or not such a claim is genuine is irrelevant) but he isn't actually ruling as king.

Or you could read any act of piracy committed by the pretender as a lawful naval exercise, since they undoubtedly would be a crew serving their king. That doesn't make them pirates.

One rules in China and one rules in Taiwan.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga

This is true regardless of which one is doing the naval action:

>If you accept their royal claim
Then their naval actions are the work of a state navy, and thus not piracy.

>If you don't
Then they're not a king even if they style themselves as one, and their actions are mere piracy.

>It really is all about hiding treasure for when you'll be able to spend it
Firstly, historically, pirates didn't 'hide' their illicit gains, any more than you can hide fairly perishable goods such as slaves, sugar, tobacco, and cocoa, which would have been high-value targets during this period. You could conceivably stash Spanish silver mined out of future-Mexico, but that period was long, long gone by the time of what we consider to be the common conception of pirates.

Secondly, apart from Morgan and a few other privateers, the vast majority of pirates were caught and executed.

Obviously in a game you could do whatever. But historically, it would be a very short game. How long do you think Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard, held onto his famous Queen Anne's Revenge? A year? Five years? Ten? Nope. Barely 7 months (he ran aground).

It does a lot to diminish the "impressiveness" of Ching Shih since it reveals she just happened to be the queen of shitters and folded the moment a decent navy came along.

There's piracy going on in modern ships right now in the indian ocean and things are only growing, the UN sends military assets on patrols that make a decent dent in it.

To get to more of a golden age you don't need nuclear devastation. Just a breakdown or lack of international cooperation on the level of the UN and mayne a few more civil wars in the region.
Shipping is still going to go through it because of the Suez channel.

She did defeat every British Navy and EIC entourage sent to capture her. The portuguese just happened to foil her fleet.

Nobody is worth a shit at anything if you judge them exclusively by their loses.