Editing Pirate (section)

===Worldbuilding Considerations===

 

The big one: Piracy is never a safe job, even when you're in port, and every action has a degree of risk to it. Pirates are criminals who endanger shipping, which makes people with money and power annoyed, which in turn leads to a good deal of energy being expended in getting rid of any pirate that causes too much trouble. Unless they're being backed up by another, similar power, or have decided to transition from just stealing shit to forming a functional republic with a navy and laws and borders, a pirate port is not stable. Even then it's not particularly stable either, although it's got a start on the climb to being a nation. Always remember: piracy comes with danger and is affected by politics much bigger than little ships with black flags. You'll present a more engaging setting if there's more to a pirate's life than you can see at Disney World. 

With that in mind, pirates still need a safe port of some kind to operate. Ships require a lot of maintenance that can only be done when at rest, and the pirates need to be able to sell or trade their captured goods. This has many subtle implications, with a few possibilities:

* The Pirates are effectively sponsored by some port. This implies either full state sponsorship of some kind, or a state that effectively doesn't care about their raiding, usually because the Pirates in question only target the enemies of whoever owns the port.  French Tortuga and Dutch Curacao were like this, being effectively surrounded by a target rich environment full of Spanish and ruled by governors who simply did not give a flip about what happened at sea.  In particular, Curacao's natural harbor with a tight channel overlooked by a fort on a ridge made it practically impossible to raid from sea, so the Dutch DID NOT care how angry the Spanish got with them over piracy because nothing short of an invasion would dislodge them.  Tortuga otoh got raided by the Spanish repeatedly, but there were just too many French and English on the island to suppress.  
* The Pirates are disguising where their goods are coming from. This is harder then it sounds, as ships are usually easily identified, and any port that cares about contraband will almost certainly be interested in the origins of whatever goods are coming into it. This will be complicated and will probably require a reliable fence who can move the goods quietly and with the illusion of legitimacy.
* The Pirates are operating on a frontier, like the boucaniers did.  Small colonies and settlements are usually much less concerned about the legitimacy of cargo if its something they can use.  They may not be able to pay very much for it, but they often can pay in other ways such as provisions and repairs.  
* Pirates who figure they can operate their own port are usually faced with the fact that most of the people who engage in piracy are not exactly reliable sorts, which is what is desperately needed in order to have a functioning port. <ref>See the (in my opinion, at least) fantastic series Black Sails for an idea of how that might work, or fail to work. If you can get past the first season being about 20% excessively long sex scenes with little plot relevance, that is. Thanks, Michael Bay. Seeing Charles Vane's sandy cock was not on my bucket list and it didn't really affect the story all that much.</ref>

For piracy to really catch on somewhere, there needs to be cargo worth capturing. A lot of stuff that gets shipped is very hard to sell, not just because it is the proverbial "hot goods", but because it is effectively worth money only to the right buyer (who is usually in one of those ports that care about contraband). You need something that is both valuable, and a commodity.  Historically, sugar qualified, as did tobacco and other luxury goods; of particular interest here is exotic pets, such as monkeys and, yes, parrots (really any large feathered birds, since feather quills were used as pens).  Whale oil (used in lamps) was another hot item, with whaling ships often making easy targets returning from hunts. But whatever the cargo, there is a fine line of intersecting interests, between the risks of accepting stolen goods, the risks of stealing them in the first place, and the potential profit.  Of course, there's always robbing payroll ships, but if they were easy to hit everyone would do it. 

For a nation whose government is fairly loose and rudimentary, the distinction between "Pirate", "Honest Trader" and "Navy" is sometimes difficult to make. Many pirates would prefer to go after foreign prey rather than people from their home ports. A down on his luck merchant captain might try to steal the stuff from a rival ship from a rival country if the choice is "make a profit, pay the crew, eliminate some of the competition and live to sail another day" or "starve to death/have a mutiny for unpaid wages/have the ship founder for disrepair/go bankrupt". Privateer work was common in times of war when said actions got sanctioned and sometimes a merchantman could have a few extra guns put on her and be made into a ghetto warship. 

To complicate matters even further, even powerful and well-organized nations like France and England had 'prize money' laws in place that made capturing enemy vessels and their cargo a very attractive prospect: any ship captured at sea and its cargo became ''de jure'' property of the crown, but the king would generously compensate the crews with money/valuables once the prize was brought in. On top of that it wasn't uncommon at all for the winner of a naval engagement to quietly enroll any surviving sailor to replace losses and/or keep manning their now captured ship (the defeated sailors were generally down with this since the alternative was usually sitting in the hold in chains), no matter their nationality; so even a 'national' crew from an 'official' Navy ship could sound like a weird mix of freebooters hauling their capture in when coming into port.

If you get enough pirates in an area, they might come together and found a town. It starts off in some place with a natural harbor to shelter in storms and repair their ships between fights. Then crews begin swapping stuff if one of them has a surplus of gunpowder and the other has a surplus of food and similar. A couple of guys are left behind from each crew (as well as captives who could not be ransomed off) to collect timber, first when it's expected that there will be some damage taken in the near future and latter more regularly around a growing logging camp. A couple of docks go up to make things go more smoothly, as does a forge or two and a couple of vegetable gardens.  If there are native peoples in the area they start showing up to trade, or occasionally raid necessitating some basic defenses.  

Then some enterprising pirate cobbles together a pub, selling plundered Beer, Grog and Rum to passing pirates and shore-side workers at first and soon enough is brewing there own, especially when a few full fledged farms get going to provide produce. A still is not far behind. Soon enough the Pub has some prostitutes and by extension some bastards. Those pirates which had lost limbs to the job may settle down with their compensation package for an easier and steadier life ashore.  Tents and lean-tos are replaced by shacks and shanties, then small cottages and after that houses. Workshops gradually come together and more and more of the population becomes permanent. 

Soon you get a thriving and lively if disorderly and dangerous new settlement, which attracts the attention of whatever state power claims control over the area.  A governor and garrison will be dispatched who start keeping out the roughest sorts, and things settle down into a more quiet and businesslike place much to the chagrin of old timers who miss the gold old days of loose women, hearty songs, exciting brawls and the odd knifings which made things dangerous and interesting.  Although occasionally a pirate captain will approach the state FIRST asking "Can I haz govnuh hat?"; this happened with Tortuga (Jean Le Vasseur).