The modern conception of pirates as depicted in popular culture is derived largely, although not always accurately, from the Golden Age of Piracy.

"[3] Pirate historians of the first half of the 20th century occasionally adopted Fiske's term "Golden Age," without necessarily following his beginning and ending dates for it.

[6] Of recent definitions, that given by Pringle appears to have the widest range, an exception to an overall trend among historians from 1909 until the 1990s, toward narrowing the Golden Age.

In his highly popular 1978 book The Pirates for TimeLife's The Seafarers series, Douglas Botting defined the Golden Age as lasting "barely 30 years, starting at the close of the 17th Century and ending in the first quarter of the 18th.

[14] Piracy arose out of, and mirrored on a smaller scale, conflicts over trade and colonization among the rival European powers of the time, including the empires of Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and France.

[citation needed] Historians such as John Fiske mark the beginning of the Golden Age of Piracy at around 1650, when the end of the Wars of Religion allowed European countries to resume the development of their colonial empires.

This involved considerable seaborne trade and a general economic improvement: there was money to be made – or stolen – and much of it traveled by ship.

The buccaneers' migration from Hispaniola's mainland to the more defensible offshore island of Tortuga limited their resources and accelerated their piratical raids.

The early English governors of Jamaica freely granted letters of marque to Tortuga buccaneers and to their own countrymen, while the growth of Port Royal provided these raiders with a far more profitable and enjoyable place to sell their booty.

In the 1660s, the new French governor of Tortuga, Bertrand d'Ogeron, similarly provided privateering commissions both to his own colonists and to English cutthroats from Port Royal.

The Glorious Revolution had restored the traditional enmity between Britain and France, thus ending the profitable collaboration between English Jamaica and French Tortuga.

The devastation of Port Royal by an earthquake in 1692 further reduced the Caribbean's attractions by destroying the pirates' chief market for fenced plunder.

Furthermore, much of the Spanish Main had simply been exhausted; Maracaibo alone had been sacked thrice between 1667 and 1678,[18] while Río de la Hacha had been raided five times and Tolú eight.

[19] At the same time, England's less-favored colonies, including Bermuda, New York, and Rhode Island, had become cash-starved by the Navigation Acts.

India's economic output dwarfed Europe's during this time, especially in high-value luxury goods such as silk and calico, which made ideal pirate booty;[21] at the same time, no powerful navies plied the Indian Ocean, leaving both local shipping and the various East India companies' vessels vulnerable to attack.

This set the stage for the famous piracies of Thomas Tew, Henry Every, Robert Culliford, and (although his guilt remains controversial) William Kidd.

As a result, thousands of seamen, including European privateers who had operated in the West Indies, were relieved of military duty, at a time when cross-Atlantic colonial shipping trade was beginning to boom.

In 1715, pirates launched a major raid on Spanish divers trying to recover gold from the sunken treasure galleon Urca de Lima near Florida.

The nucleus of the pirate force was a group of English ex-privateers, all of whom were soon to be enshrined in infamy: Henry Jennings, Charles Vane, Samuel Bellamy of Whydah Gally fame, Benjamin Hornigold, and Edward England.

The attack was successful, but contrary to their expectations, the governor of Jamaica refused to allow Jennings and his cohorts to spend their loot on his island.

With Kingston and the declining Port Royal closed to them, Hornigold, Jennings, and their comrades based themselves at Nassau, on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas.

[22] Transatlantic shipping traffic between Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe began to soar in the 18th century, a model known as the triangular trade, and became a rich target for piracy.

Merchant shippers used the surplus of labor to drive wages down, cut corners to maximize profits, and create unsavory conditions aboard their vessels.

Taylor and Levasseur reaped the greatest prize in the history of the Golden Age of Piracy, the plunder of the Portuguese East Indiaman Nossa Senhora Do Cabo at Réunion in 1721, stealing diamonds and other treasures worth a total of £800,000.

She came to the West Indies (Caribbean) after leaving her husband and joined Calico Jack's crew after he attacked a ship she had been aboard.

The coastal villages and towns of Italy, Spain and Mediterranean islands were frequently attacked by them, and long stretches of the Italian and Spanish coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants; since the 17th century, Barbary pirates occasionally entered the Atlantic and struck as far north as Iceland.

Barbary pirates flourished in the early 17th century as new sailing rigs by Simon de Danser enabled North African raiders, for the first time, to brave the Atlantic as well as Mediterranean waters.

While pirates are commonly depicted with eyepatches, this is largely a myth originating in nineteenth century novels and tales of buccaneers that included payment for a lost eye.

They originated in Tortuga around the 17th century as hunters, but became "pirates" when government officials paid groups of men to attack and loot Spanish ships.

The events of the latter half of 1718 (including the arrival of Governor Woodes Rogers in Nassau) represent a turning point in the history of piracy in the New World.