Defining qualities that make good Captain: A ship requires much skill in both operating/fighting a ship, and commanding/leading a ship. Usually it takes a good balance of both sides of the spectrum to be a good Captain. Let us explore the world of what a Captain has to have to be a good Captain. Handling Skills It usually requires a good seaman to become a Captain. One example of this is Captain Kid. When he started out, he was just a man looking for a fortune as a privateer. Sailors don't commonly respect commanders and officers with no idea on how to sail a vessel. But there are exceptions to the rule that a good seaman is needed. Lord Nelson (referring to the Lord Nelson from the Napoleonic Wars) was not considered a great seaman, but a good leader. A ship requires many things:

Techniques for More than one Ship:

Commonly, Pirates worked alone, due to the fact that when alone, all the profits went to that ship. Today, a lot of novels and movies have stories of how two to five Pirate ships in a fleet. In most modern Pirate PC and Video games, you might see a big fleet of two to five ships, every couple of hours! Modern games exaggerate how many Pirates sail the seas to the point that you would think that the Caribbean had a million Pirates. Some games give Pirates 3rd Rate, 2nd Rate, and 1st Rate ships! The biggest pirate ships were only around 40 guns, and commonly never bigger, due to the fact that it was extremely hard to keep the crew numbers up to man such a big vessels, and to feed so many men.

Anyways, sometimes pirates would unite together to help defend each other, take bigger amounts of prizes, and sometimes a cruise with multiple ships can make more profits per ship than a ship by itself (but not often). But the one thing is that these alliances are rarely (if never) between the big ships. Usually, the alliances are between small ships that need the profits and protection. There are also other times when very successful pirates like Black Bart and Blackbeard needed ships to hold cargo, and to have faster ships to catch those faster merchants that are faster than the big flagship. But what are some techniques that these fleets used?

The exact picture of what a Pirate ship and crew was, is very often confused. A combination of romanticism, stereotyping, Hollywood films, and video/computer games has effected what we think a true pirate crew and ship is. Let us take a look into what is true and what is not.

Pirate Crews – The Stereotype
The common stereotype of a Pirate would include these items: Wooden leg, Eye patch, Hook, Bandanna, Hat with Skull&Cross, Treasure Map, Cutlass, Pistol, and a Parrot or 2.

Common Tactics on How Pirates Took Merchant Ships

Pirates commonly lived from day to day, not knowing if they would survive the next day, or eat the next day. People didn’t go into Piracy commonly for profit, but for just basic survival; just to keep food in your stomach. So when a Pirate saw a ship on the horizon, they hoped that it was a merchant ship full of supplies. But also, they hoped that it wasn’t a Naval ship, armed for battle, and full of properly fed men ready for combat. Pirate crews were not as good as you think they were. Many pirates started as either common person from land, recent sailors unemployed from the Navies of Europe, and/or fishermen. Most Pirates tried to avoid combat, so unless they had experience from the Navy, or had been a Pirate for a long time, they most likely didn’t know how to fight, and most likely didn’t practice at the guns because gunpowder and shot cost money, and were invaluable to a Pirate that most likely had to steal everything. Pirates didn’t steal as many ships as you think. But then again, a Pirate was commonly desperate, and would fight with all he’s got. A common pirate career might only include 1 capture, or 10 captures, or 50 captures like “Black Bart” did. So there wasn’t that much time to gain experience in combat. So many factors went into on who and what a pirate was.

How to handle Naval Artillery

A ship's gun from the Age of Sail is commonly related to cannon. But the one thing about cannons is that they aren’t even called cannons. A true cannon during the 1600s was actually a cannon that was 12 feet long, and fired a 60-pound ball.   Usually, what we think of as cannons would be referred to as guns, or mounted guns, or naval artillery, or be called by their names or by the weight of the shot it used. But the guns used by the ship were the prime weapons fighting at long range. It could scare off pirates, or pirates could scare merchants into surrender. But a prime use was in the Navy, were ships could have 70 to 100 guns. So the Naval Artillery was a true tactical to practical.