“We have learned from one who knew and frequently conversed with Bowen that he was born of creditable parents in the island of Bermuda who gave him a good education befitting him for the sea.” — Captain Charles Johnson, 1724.Seven hundred years after the Vikings executed their sometimes piratical excursions about Europe, a new form of thief came into being in the Caribbean Sea and beyond: the “pirate”, exemplified by evil souls such as ‘Blackbeard’, one Edward Teach. The word descends in English from a Greek original meaning ‘to attack’ and that is precisely what these chaps (and the occasion lady) did, largely at sea, in the taking by any means of ships for plunder. The OED defines a pirate as ‘a person who attacks and robs ships at sea’, vessels usually going about their normal legitimate business.While money was the root, trunk, branches and leaves of piratical thievery, rape and pillage and murder were all part of the vicious means to object the golden end. Thus it is an abiding surprise to see, particularly in this politically correct and over-sensitive age, that pirates are constantly presented to children as creatures of fun, just out to have a bit of amusement, jollies that often ended in the ‘walking the plank’ to a watery grave by their innocent victims.The eponymous ‘Golden Age’ of piracy in the Americas took place over half a century, ending in the 1720s with the hanging or civilising of most of the ‘gentlemen’ concerned. Bermudians were involved in such get-rich-quick work, a few as pirates and a number as ‘privateers’, the last a legalised form of plundering ships, given a margin of creditability by a ‘letter of marque’ from an authority such as the reigning monarch. William Zuill Senior is in the final stage of preparing a book on that silver-laden age and you will also find mention of one of the local characters engaged in the pirate trade in Horst Augustinovic’s forthcoming book What you may not know about Bermuda 2.Thievery by its nature takes place under the cover of darkness, from the point of view that its perpetrators do not record or publish their ‘findings’. That goes for all forms of piracy, even in modern times, for the looting of archaeological sites is but a newer form of stealing from others.Shipwrecks are perhaps at the forefront of the continued practice and can be seen as completing the job a pirate of old would have done before a vessel went to the bottom. Such heritage theft has an extra body blow as ‘pirates’ destroy the context of archaeological sites in their singular grab for the silver and gold. Some governments apply a new cover of legitimacy to such activities by the granting of licences, usually provided that they get a percentage of the loot (and received on behalf of their people, the entire ‘cut’ of heritage destroyed).The Golden Age of piracy has therefore not necessarily ended for some dealing with the destruction of archaeological sites, nor for the likes of seamen from Somalia or those operating with full evil intent in the Strait of Malacca and other undefended waters of the world’s oceans. Once the newly-formed modern states, armed with warship capacity, started clamping down on piracy in the Atlantic and Caribbean, some of the pirates moved into the world’s third largest sea, the Indian Ocean, a vast stretch of water extending from East Africa to the western reaches of the Orient and from Arabia to Antarctica. Bermudians, and Bermudian ‘venture capitalists’ (through agents such as the pirate Thomas Tew), joined the trend to go halfway around the world to see what they could get for free.One such local boy was John Bowen written about in the 1724 publication, “A General History of the Pyrates”, thought by some to have been authored by Daniel Defoe, he of the famous shipwreck story, “Robinson Crusoe”, perhaps next to “Treasure Island”, once one of the most widely read books in the Atlantic World.In the 2007 volume “X marks the spot: the Archaeology of Piracy”, writer Patrick Lizé relates the story of Mauritius and the wreck of the Speaker, ‘the first pirate ship to be investigated archaeologically’, that is also to say that the Speaker was the first shipwreck that could be positively associated with a pirate, namely the Bermudian John Bowen.The ship came to a wet and sticky end in January 1702 on the southeast corner of the then Dutch island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, but Captain Bowen and most of his gang survived. He paid off the Governor, and eventually shipped out to Madagascar, a haven for pirates of the period; there he and his mates stole a boat called Speedy Return, which had stopped at the island to buy slaves in the summer of 1702. Thirty-odd guns were found at the wreck of the Speaker and some of the artefacts recovered in 1980 are apparently on display in a Mauritius museum.In August 1703, Bowen was operating with another pirate, Thomas Howard, in the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean, where they captured several vessels. They divided the loot at Rajapura on the coast of Gujarat and Bowen retired to a civilian life on the French Indian Ocean island of Bourbon (later Réunion). While he was one of the few pirates to get out of the game with a large fortune, he lived not long to enjoy his ill-gotten gains, for “on March 13, 1705, a sudden attack of colic carried him off, before he had time to utter a single word”! The local priest refused to bury him as he was considered a heretic, so “a simple grave in the underbrush was Bowen’s final resting place”.When Bowen retired, his captaincy was assumed by another Bermudian pirate in the Indian Ocean arena, one Nathaniel North, on the ship Defiant, later lost. North thereafter commanded a pirate base at Ambonavoula, Madagascar, where he died some time after 1709, apparently murdered in his bed by irate natives, with whom he and his gang of pirates were at war.Thus ended Bermuda’s influence, somewhat of a negative order (despite creditable parents), in the Indian Ocean of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and our copies of the ‘Jolly Roger’ pirate flag have presumably not flown there since.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Director of the National Museum at Dockyard. Comments may be made to director@bmm.bm or 704-5480.