The trial usually was in a court martial held land-side, but in extreme cases could be by drum-head court-martial on the high seas convened by the officers of the capturing ship. Therefore all nations were bound by admiralty law to capture, bring to trial, and (if found guilty) execute any pirates they encountered regardless of whether the nation had been attacked by that particular pirate or not. So piracy was seen as a crime committed against all nations. The high seas could be claimed by no nation, they were the common property of all. In the present day pirates operating around places like Indonesia will often torture and kill those who they capture.īut over and above the homicide aspect, under Admiralty law pirates were considered Hostis humani generis (Latin for "enemy of mankind"). These are not the jolly comedic figures many of us remember from childhood stories.Īnd this is not just historical pirates. The message was to hand over your treasure with no resistance, or the pirates would kill you and take it anyway. The skull-and-crossed-bones flag contained skulls and bones as a message to the hapless galleon. If nothing else many pirates were savage murderers. Synonyms for "pirate" include corsair, buccaneer, and freebooter.ĭo keep in mind that back in the days of Blackbeard piracy was punishable by death.
It would be several orders of magnitude easier for the "piracy" to take the form of grand theft from the merchant's warehouses on the ground. Or a rude surprise for a space merchant ship whose trajectory passes too near the Somali Asteroids for that matter. There ain't no stealth in space, so it is practically impossible for a fat space galleon to be surprised in mid trip by a sinister space corsair flying the Jolly Roger.
Alas, in a scientifically accurate world, they are more or less impossible, much like space fighters and for similar reasons. The image of pirate freebooters on the high seas is just too romantic for words, science fiction writers can't resist. Space Pirates is a science fiction trope that just won't go away. Playing counters from tabletop boardgame Triplanetary
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