Our image of a pirate crew is that of a band of ruthless cutthroats, each one ready to knife his mates in the back if it meant advancing his own fortune. To some extent, that image is accurate. Certainly, the stakes for which these men played meant that their lives could be forfeit at an instant, and in the end the only one a pirate could ultimately trust was himself.
However, surviving in a small wooden ship on the open ocean is a formidable task in itself, made even more deadly by the constant game of cat and mouse with the navies of the most powerful empires in the world. Anarchy would have been suicide. To that end, many pirate ships operated under formal sets of rules – the Pirate Codes – that would be signed by all hands and displayed prominently aboard ship. Few of these codes have survived, since when capture was imminent one of the first things pirates would do would be to destroy any evidence of piracy, but thankfully a few of them have found their way to us:
- The Pirate Code of Bartholomew Roberts
- The Pirate Code of John Phillips
- The Pirate Code of George Lowther and Edward Low
- The Pirate Code of Henry Morgan