When James I of England ended the war with Spain upon assuming the throne in 1603, many privateers refused to give up their livelihood and simply continued to plunder.

Here's a scurvy world, and as scurvily we live in't, we feed here upon the water, on the Kings salt beef, without ere a pence to buy us a bissell [bushel of grain] when we come ashore.

This night, when the Captain and Officers shall conjecture nothing but that we are drawing dry the pot, we'll be diving arm deep in the Fugitives bags.Ward and his colleagues deserted and stole a small 25-ton barque from Portsmouth Harbour.

[13] They sailed to the Moroccan Atlantic port city Salé, Morocco where in 1605 several English and Dutch sailors, including Richard Bishop and Anthony Johnson, joined Ward's crew.

Ward's top lieutenant, William Graves, captured a small English merchantman called the York Bonaventure captained by Andrew Barker.

On 26 April 1607, between Cyprus and Turkey, Ward spotted "a great argosy of fourteen or fifteen hundred tons",[16] a Venetian ship named Reniera e Soderina.

Still, a report from the Venetian Ambassador in London told the privy council that Venice was close to declaring war on England due to Ward's piracy.

That ambassador, Secretary Esposizioni, wrote:That famous pirate, Ward, so well-known in this port for the damage he has done, is beyond a doubt the greatest scoundrel that ever sailed from England.

He has refitted a Venetian ship Soderina and turned her into a berton, with forty pieces of bronze artillery on the lower, and twenty on the upper deck.

[17]The English Ambassador in Venice assured the Council "As to Ward, who captured the Soderina and transformed her into a berton, he will meet with a warm reception if he comes into these waters.

He accepted Islam along with his entire crew and changed his name to Yusuf Reis, with a nickname of Chakour or Chagour, because he used an axe in his piracy acts.

He used the city of Aquilaria (El Haouaria) as an acting port, and married an Italian woman while continuing to send money to his English wife.

[20] An English sailor who saw him in Tunis in 1608 allegedly described Ward as "very short with little hair, and that quite white, bald in front; swarthy face and beard.

He profited greatly by his piracy, retiring to Tunis to live a life of opulent comfort until his death in 1622, at the age of 70, possibly from the plague.

To his contemporaries, Ward was an enigmatic figure, in some ways like a Robin Hood, but in the 16th and 17th centuries, many English pirates operated out of the mouth of the Sebou River and preyed on Mediterranean shipping.

In the 2010s, various Turkish newspapers and websites popularised a hypothesis put forth in the monthly Derin Tarih that John Ward could be the inspiration for the character Jack Sparrow from the film series Pirates of the Caribbean.