Piracy in the Caribbean began on a small scale, with a small but growing number of attacks being recorded from 1714 on. One of these early pirates was Benjamin Hornigold, who quit Jamaica to base himself in the Bahamas. It was a struggling backwater of a colony, its settlers eking out a threadbare existence through farming and salvage. By the time Hornigold arrived in Nassau in 1714, there wasn’t any real authority in the islands, so he was able to establish himself in the small port. Then, when Henry Jennings and his treasure-laden followers arrived in Nassau in early 1716, the scale of the problem grew exponentially. In all, it was reckoned as many as 2,000 pirates were operating between 1714 and 1725.
For the most part, pirates were largely unknown seamen, and
