One of my favourite anecdotes about the first Golden Age of Piracy is that, at one point, Captain Henry Morgan left England in one ship, and arrived in the Caribbean commanding a completely different ship, and nobody knows why. What happened to the first ship and how he acquired the second one are entirely unrecorded.
At some point in his short career (1715 until 1718), the English pirate Ben Hornigold attacked a sloop near Honduras just to steal all the hats of the crew, because his own crew had gotten drunk the night before and they had tossed every single one of their own hats overboard.
Bartholomew Roberts, arguably the most successful pirate in history by ships captured (a whopping 470 in 3 years), didn’t actually want to be a pirate. His ship was captured and he was forced to join the pirate crew.
After the original pirate captain was killed, he was democratically elected captain of the pirate crew less than 6 weeks after being captured by them.
When Jack Rackham was apprehended off the coast of Jamaica in 1720, six of the men tried and executed for piracy aboard his ship were innocent Englishmen. They’d been rowing about Bry Harbour Bay in a canoe trying to catch turtles when the pirates hailed them and invited them on board for some punch, ‘which,’ noted Captain Johnson in The General History of the Pyrates (1724), ‘everybody must allow proved somewhat unlucky to the poor fellows.’
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