The Pirate Anthology will be a series of individual threads related to piracy, particularly - though not exclusively - in the Age of Sail. This consolidated OOC thread will serve as a table of contents and an index for pirate-themed threads related to Earth II and its many potential theaters of piracy. Any and all participants may use this OOC thread to post information applicable to those IC threads, which will be listed below. Please take note of any historical canon presented but do not assume anything is necessarily written in stone. Please be kind enough to read through all of the applicable information before you begin so that you are fully caught up with the matter. As always, feel free to make suggestions. This is intended to be a collaborative project and thus it would not be possible without everyone's input.
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Background
Just as in the real world, Earth II has experienced piracy of the high seas dating back almost to time immemorial. In no way, shape, or form would our history be any different in that sense. Of course, there would be variations in the time, the locations, and the "characters" but there existed the conditions for piracy then just as they did in real life; after all, we do use the same map as this planet upon which we reside. With that in mind, we can focus on the historical areas with little effort. One merely has to look at a map and point to any heavily trafficked body of water to find a home for piracy: the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, East Asia, the Indian Ocean, and so on and so forth.
From the perspective of the Atlantic Ocean, piracy will easily date back as long as ships are crossing between North America and Europe. From the perspective of a major thread in this anthology, the focus will be on a confederacy of pirate-ruled states in the Azores, the Canaries, the Madeira Islands, northern Morocco, the Balearic Islands, and even Gibraltar. It will be this vast confederacy of sorts that gives particular consternation to nations passing into and out of the Med, especially the - then - Kingdom of Layarteb.
From the perspective of the Caribbean, there is little one can do that hasn't already been done in both fiction and reality. If there is perhaps any theater that is most famous for piracy it would be the Caribbean but perhaps that is the result of print and visual media rather than history - who am I to say. Regardless, the Caribbean is home to a vast array of pirates throughout the Age of Sail but also before and beyond.
More to come…
Table of Contents
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