Robbery, murder, mayhem: N.S. author explores ‘golden age’ of piracy in new book edition

Local historian and author Dan Conlin’s new book highlights Pirates of the Atlantic.

A Nova Scotia historian is capturing the history of pirates in the Maritimes and breaking down myth from reality in an expanded edition of one of his books.

Dan Conlin says the Atlantic region attracted some of the biggest pirates during “The Golden Age of Piracy” in the 1720s.

“They were attracted by the big offshore fishery in the region. They would come up from the Caribbean like clockwork almost every June – big pirates like Bartholomew Roberts, who captured over 500 ships, made a spectacular raid in Cape Breton and Newfoundland in 1720, he even raided shore settlements. And then Ned Low, a vicious psychopath, came up here for two seasons, 1722 and 1723,” he says.

Conlin adds that while there were a few, and well documented, female pirates in the 18^th century, piracy was an almost all-male endeavour.

Many governors in colonial governments were afraid of pirates because they weren’t able to control them.

“For about two decades it was an annual scourge,” Conlin says. “The main thing they came to our region for was recruits. There was more gold and silver in, say, west Africa or the Caribbean but there were lots of unhappy fishermen who were not pleased with the contracts they were working and they could easily be temped to join a pirate crew.”

And fishermen who weren’t interested in becoming pirates still had to deal the possibility of attacks by them.

“They often had muskets and cannons and the pirates would usually overwhelm those ships and rearm themselves and they also always had a keen eye for a good, large fishing vessel that they could dump their old ship and pick up a new one,” says Conlin.

While piracy in the Atlantic region is mainly a thing of history, it continues in other parts of the world.

“Every year dozens of professional mariners are murdered by pirates,” Conlin says.

He hopes readers will walk away from reading his book with a better understanding of piracy’s deadly reality.

“(It’s) not just ‘yo ho ho’ romantic myths. There were, in our region, real, deadly pirates that came here in the 1720s, and although piracy faded from our region and became a once-a-generation thing, it’s still an active, deadly thing in other parts of the world, people facing similar challenges to those fishermen in the 1720s off the coast of Nova Scotia.”

Conlin will speak during at an event at the Halifax Central Library at 7 p.m. Wednesday and during another on Feb. 17 at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

New and expanded editions of his book, “Pirates of the Atlantic: Robbery, Murder and Mayhem Off the Canadian East Coast,” will be available.

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