the pirate plague of the dead bartholomew roberts ship

However, unlike Boles, Bartholomew Roberts was seemingly never called “Black Bart” in his lifetime.

He is also well-known today by the moniker “Black Bart,” which he shares with a Wild West outlaw whose real name was Charles Boles, maybe we’ll cover him someday, as well. We’re not sure why or when, but it was quite common for pirates to use aliases. At one point, he changed his first name to Bartholomew. John Roberts was born in 1682, in the tiny village of Little Newcastle in Wales. One of the men who defined the Golden Age of Piracy, there was a time when he was considered invincible and every merchant and sailor in the Atlantic knew and feared the name of Bartholomew Roberts.

Roberts is credited with well over 400 prizes, all within a short time frame of three years.

That refers to the number of ships that he captured, plundered, or ransomed. Today, we are using another metric to establish the piratical credentials of Captain Bartholomew Roberts aka “Black Bart” – the number of prizes taken.

The pirate plague of the dead bartholomew roberts ship