Home Β» Posts tagged 'pirate ships'. Modern histories of so-called Golden Age pirates β those circa to β are often filled with images of pirate ships, many of which are implied to be accurate representations. In fact, there are few eyewitness images of actual buccaneer and pirate ships of this era β perhaps no more than five! Most period images of buccaneer and pirate ships, not mention of pirate prey and pirate hunters, were drawn not by eyewitnesses in the Caribbean or in other places pirates roved but in England and Europe by the professional illustrators of various editions of books on buccaneers and pirates.
These artists never saw the vessels they drew, probably had little if any input from eyewitnesses who had seen them, and were often clearly inept when it came to accurate representation Hollywood also has always often had this problem and still does.
There were no professional artists such as the Willem van de Velde father and son, or Pierre Puget, or any of a number of maritime painters of the era to paint the Caribbean and its people, landscapes, and vessels. At best they are intelligently conjectural. But conjectural they are, even if they are the best we might ever do. Nonetheless, there exist eyewitness illustrations of at least five Golden Age sea roving vessels we can for the most part put names, captains, and adventures to.
In other words, they are illustrations of real buccaneer or pirate vessels made by illustrators and painters who actually saw them or were provided a high degree of detail by eyewitnesses. Additionally, there is an illustration of two others that is almost certainly based on eyewitness descriptions taken firsthand by the illustrator. The third and fourth are of a captured Spanish merchantman soon to be converted by flibustiers to piracy, and its captor.
The fifth is a pirate which had recently plundered on the Guinea coast. The sixth and seventh are pirates, one English, one French, one of whom was destroyed by a pair of English men-of-war. Further, we have illustrations of the two most famous Spanish pirate hunting ships β even if unsuccessful more often than successful β along with an excellent, highly detailed, quite accurate drawing of the HMS Drake , a sixth rate used for pirate hunting in the s Caribbean, and the HMS Bonetta , which was dispatched against a pirate but did not engage it β plus a reasonable image each of the pirate hunters HMS Drake and HMS Falcon.
