As world trade burgeoned in the age of colonial expansion, valuable cargoes were transported across the world s oceans, providing vast opportunity for piracy on the seas. Who were the most famous pirates, and who were the worst? And were there any female pirates? Here are 14 of history s most despicable pirates, who plundered the seas from the ports of the American colonies to the Indian Ocean…
A handful of coins unearthed from a pick-your-own-fruit orchard in rural Rhode Island and other random corners of New England might help solve one of the planet’s oldest cold cases.
The villain in this tale is a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most-wanted criminal after plundering a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims home to India from Mecca, and then eluded capture by posing as a slave trader.
“It’s a new history of a nearly perfect crime,” said Jim Bailey, an amateur historian and metal detectorist who found the first intact 17th-century Arabian coin in a meadow in Middletown.
That ancient pocket change
Ancient coins may solve mystery of notorious 17th-century English pirate
Updated: April 1, 2021, 8:13 pm
A 17th-century Arabian silver coin, top, that research shows was struck in 1693 in Yemen, rests near an Oak Tree Shilling minted in 1652 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, below, and a Spanish half real coin from 1727, right, on a table, in Warwick, Rhode Island (Steven Senne/AP)
A handful of coins unearthed from a pick-your-own-fruit orchard in rural Rhode Island and other random corners of New England in the US may help solve one of the planet’s oldest cold cases.
The villain in the tale is a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most-wanted criminal after plundering a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims home to India from Mecca, then eluded capture by posing as a slave trader.
Henry Every and his crew helped plunder an armed Mughal trading vessel
This created tensions between the empire and England/the East India Company
The English Government placed a bounty upon the murderous pirate s head
Captain Every and his crew fled via Bourbon and Ascension to New Providence
Yet news of their crimes caught up with them, and they were forced to flee again
Exactly where Every and most of his crew went next has remained a mystery
Recently found coins support the theory that some ended up in New England