Pirate name generator

Most famous pirates sailed in the Golden Age of Piracy, roughly the 1650s to the 1730s. Their nicknames came from a beard, a coat, a height or a reputation, but many of the best known were added later by writers, starting with Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates of 1724. The generator leaves these real names out; here is where they came from, and how sure anyone can be:

Pirates often swapped up to a better ship they had captured, and renamed it. The same few names came back again and again: a Revenge, a Fortune, a Royal something, a Ranger. The ship tool above follows those patterns and says what each ship was before.

Johnson wrote that Roberts' crew called their black flag the Jolly Roger, and the name seems to have meant any black pirate flag. Its origin is unknown: Old Roger was a nickname for the devil, while the popular joli rouge story has no period source. A black flag usually went up first and offered quarter to a ship that surrendered; a red bloody flag meant none.

Most flags credited to famous pirates are later inventions. The only description from Blackbeard's time mentions black flags with death's heads and bloody flags; the horned skeleton spearing a heart first appears in a 1912 article, according to the Queen Anne's Revenge Project, though some museums still show it as his. Calico Jack's crossed swords were tied to him by a book of 1959. Roberts' flag is better attested: witnesses saw a death's head with a cutlass.

A pirate captain was elected, and the crew could vote him out. Crews signed articles, the rules of the voyage. Roberts' articles, as Johnson printed them, gave every man a vote, two shares of a prize to the captain and quartermaster, one and a half to the master, boatswain and gunner, one and a quarter to other officers and one to everyone else, with 800 dollars from the common stock for a man who lost a limb. The term pirate code is modern; they said articles. The quartermaster, elected too, kept order and shared out the loot, and the crew also had a sailing master to navigate, a boatswain for the rigging, a gunner, a carpenter, often a surgeon, a cook and musicians.

According to the Royal Museums Greenwich, pirates never made victims walk the plank, an idea that comes mostly from Peter Pan and films. Captain Kidd buried treasure once; most pirates spent their loot fast, and treasure maps come from Treasure Island. Some pirates did have wooden legs or a lost eye.

Pirate talk is just as recent. Pirates probably did not say arr: they came from all over and sounded like other sailors. The growl comes from Robert Newton's Long John Silver in Disney's 1950 Treasure Island, played in his own West Country accent, which shaped how pirates have sounded ever since. It is celebrated every 19 September, International Talk Like a Pirate Day.