Original subtitles

When the Spanish treasure fleet spills its fortune

off the coast of Florida,

the pirates of the Caribbean clean up.

We're gonna get so rich, we'll be shittin' gold.

Their humble base in Nassau

turns into a boomtown...

...run by Benjamin Hornigold's Flying Gang,

Black Sam Bellamy, Paulsgrave Williams,

and his latest recruit, Edward Thatch, soon to be known as Blackbeard.

But in this brutal world, loyalty comes cheap.

It's a funny thing, loyalty.

Can flip on a coin.

Captain Henry Jennings,

a posh pirate,

is Hornigold's archrival.

And it isn't just loyalty to each other that's tested.

They've got rich attacking Spanish ships.

But, when the war with Spain ends in 1714,

these British pirates turn on their own crown.

Fuck that sausage-eating ass-wipe, King George.

England's merchant ships trade in a commodity so precious

they call it "black gold."

It's the slave trade.

You're no longer slaves!

You are now subject to the laws of piracy.

For many slaves, this means liberty.

But mess with the powerful slave traders...

...at your peril.

I want them dead!

The Empire strikes back.

Captain Henry Jennings is on the run from the English Crown.

He's threatened the peace with Spain by robbing their ships.

And we were having such a nice time.

He's forced to take refuge in Hornigold's pirate lair.

Now, now, Edward, we must be charitable.

Hello, Henry. Welcome to Nassau.

I see you brought your lapdog with you.

Don't expect me to lick my own balls, surely?

Jennings and Hornigold had been privateers during the war,

they'd both been employed by Archibald Hamilton

to defend Jamaica,

um, but they had quite different social backgrounds.

Henry Jennings is a plantation owner based out of Jamaica

and looks down on Hornigold, the uncouth sailor.

It would have had to have been awkward

once Jennings was resident full-time in Nassau,

in that Hornigold was the founder of the pirate nest.

They represented two sort of competing power bases and factions.

Keep him on a leash though, will you? This is a nice establishment.

Don't want him shitting all over the floor.

So, I hear you're a wanted man, Captain.

Ooh, that must be frustrating,

forced to hide out here with the likes of us.

Paulsgrave Williams and Black Sam Bellamy

were once part of Jennings' crew.

No, no, please. No. Please, no.

But Bellamy can't stomach Jennings' brutal brand of piracy...

No. Oh.

What are you doing? Stop!

...and jumped ship to Hornigold's Flying Gang.

Give you more time to walk your dog.

Feed him a bone.

I'll give you a fucking bone!

You will do nothing.

Thatch, you'd better make your friend stand down.

Caesar's a free man to do as he pleases.

And if he pleases to slit your throat,

I'll be there to mop up the floor afterwards.

Jennings and Hornigold both realize that

each of them and their faction needed the Pirate Republic to succeed,

and that meant at least tacit cooperation.

It makes for a volatile alliance.

Loyalty is hard won.

It's also easily lost.

Hornigold's loyalty to the English Crown is not shared by all his men.

It's a funny thing, loyalty.

Can flip on a coin.

I mean, I've heard your men aren't too happy

about passing up all that English loot,

and that some might be looking to join up with young Bellamy there,

who apparently has no such qualms.

For more than a hundred years,

English pirates had attacked what were traditionally enemies of England,

either Spanish or Portuguese ships.

But the 17-teens, for really the first time,

uh, English pirates actively engaged English shipping.

Hornigold, because he's been in a dominant leadership position

in this community,

is actually quite typical of piracy culture at the time.

He has tried very hard to not target British shipping,

given his history as a privateer.

I'm not attacking British ships.

I'm English.

Whatever the fuck that means out here.

Bellamy doesn't have the same prohibitions.

They want to consider any merchant ship fair game, if the opportunity allows.

The new British King is a German, George I.

He doesn't even speak English.

Fuck England!

And fuck that sausage-eating ball-bag they've stuck on the throne.

Well, they don't care about us out here.

Never have.

They just want to keep the money rolling in.

What my good friend Paulsgrave is trying to say is, with respect,

we're going after anything we can.

And if it's flying a Union Jack, so be it.

We need to be careful with that one.

The most deadliest of the species.

But the most fun.

Anne Bonny,

who will become the most famous woman pirate,

has her own ax to grind against the English.

As an Irish Catholic, she owes no loyalty

to the Protestant oppressors of her homeland.

Men take what they want

when they want.

They steal, they lie,

they murder and they cheat one another.

And if you're weak,

someone steals up in the night,

fucks you, and slits your throat.

What do you want?

I just want to make my fortune

and go home to England a rich man.

England?

You want to go back to the cold and the rain?

To the kings and the laws and the taxes?

Nobody in that godforsaken hole gives one shit for you.

Hmm.

If it were me, I'd pirate for the rest my days

and murder anyone that tried to stop me.

You know, I love Nassau,

but one day,

they're coming for us.

It's not long before Hornigold's loyalty to England

is put to the test.

It's a merchant ship.

When faced with the actual opportunity to take an English ship,

Hornigold demurs, doesn't want to actually do this.

To hell with him.

Bellamy, no problem at all.

Hoist the black flag!

Because this offers a possibility for greater enrichment,

and that Hornigold is too restrictive.

Bellamy's success undermines Hornigold

in the eyes of his crew.

It might look like a mutiny under conventional terms,

if you saw this in the merchant service or the naval service.

Really isn't, among pirates.

It's relatively well known that there's this kind of idea of

democracy on board a pirate ship,

but I think it's misunderstood, how profound it was.

Every single individual has a vote, no matter who.

And if the organization decides that

the captain's not operating with enough bravery or strategy,

they can depose him and elect a new captain in.

Hornigold's trusted lieutenant, Edward Thatch,

organizes a democratic vote.

So, we're all agreed?

You're happy with your decision?

So it is.

The fact that Bellamy is inspiring them

and saying that he will pursue all sorts of quarry

would be appealing to a number of these pirates.

Yeah, you should go, Henry.

Join up with Bellamy, he's a good man.

He'll see you right.

The men have voted.

And what's their decision?

They want Bellamy as their captain.

And Williams will be his quartermaster.

Loved and respected as he is,

Hornigold loses the vote by approximately two thirds to one,

and, with respect, is asked to stand down,

and is no longer commodore of the fleet.

And what about you?

We're sticking with you, my friend.

Our image of pirates tends to be of lawless men who obey no rules

and are loyal only to themselves,

and so it's surprising when we encounter these moments of loyalty,

like that showed to Hornigold.

I won't forget this.

I'm gonna get a ship and make you captain.

And we're gonna be a force,

make no fucking mistake.

Hornigold finds comfort with Anne Bonny.

She's become a pirate to escape her past.

Your husband, James, does he mind you...?

James is a spineless child.

I should have never married him.

You don't much care for men, do you, Anne?

They have their uses,

but mostly, they're weak.

My father was weak.

He had me out of wedlock with a servant girl.

He didn't cast us out.

No,

he raised me as a little boy,

right under his wife's nose.

Brought me into the household and introduced me

as one of his junior clerks.

Of course, it wasn't long before his wife discovered the truth of it.

And he left her,

took me and my ma to America to start a new life.

He goes into business and makes more money than he ever did as a lawyer.

So, he is the head of this prosperous estate

and Anne is, from the age of 12, mistress of that estate.

Her mother passed away

not long after they moved to the American colonies.

And I came into my womanhood.

And his conscience

didn't stop him from finding his way to my bed.

Then I met James,

and he seemed like a way to escape.

But he was just a trap.

Just like all men.

The legend of Sam Bellamy is growing.

He's now known as Black Sam,

because of his raven-colored hair.

He was a very good marine tactician,

daring and innovative,

and seems rather fearless.

Your manifest, and quick about it!

You get a sense, following his career and the pace

of the vessels he attacks,

that this is somebody who's in a hurry to get to somewhere or something.

And that somebody is the love of his life,

Mary Hallett, the woman he's promised to marry,

and now the mother of his child.

At this point, her parents abandoned her completely,

because, the shame of it.

You know, a child born out of wedlock?

Disgusting. So, she hides the baby.

But where there's life, there's hope.

And Black Sam is making good on his promise to return a rich man.

"The notorious pirate, Samuel Bellamy,

did capture and rob the vessel Morning Star off Cape Cod."

"Much gold was taken,

along with valuable items from passengers aboard."

His name has spread like wildfire.

He is one of the world's most notorious pirates already,

just a few months after leaving her.

"But no man was hurt, and the vessel was allowed to continue its journey."

They'll hang you for this.

I'll be back.

He's going to come for us.

Then we'll be together, wealthy.

You see?

Shh, shh, shh, shh.

But, for Bellamy, piracy is about more than gold.

He was clearly driven by

the social rebellion aspect of piracy.

Think of me as a, uh, a Robin Hood.

Bellamy is renowned for being very fair and just

when he deals with ships that he's acquired.

Right, I need men with skills.

He really takes pride in giving the crews that he captures

the opportunity to join him,

the opportunity to throw off the shackles of oppression.

Unlike the merchant navy

and those scumbag businessmen who work you to death

and flog you to ribbons when the mood catches them, we...

we will pay you like kings.

And if you don't like my decisions, you can vote for a new captain.

That's right, every man has a vote,

and an equal share of any treasure we take.

So, why work like a dog, and get whipped like one, too,

just to put money in the pockets of some rich tosser

who gives you a handful of copper as payment?

So, any of you looking for a better life...

this is your chance.

While Bellamy is sharing out the booty taken from British traders,

recruits flock to join him.

And they start young.

One of the passengers was a boy called John King.

His family were relatively wealthy, and he was traveling with his mother.

You're Black Sam Bellamy, the Robin Hood of the seas.

You steal from the rich and give to the poor.

He thought that the pirates were so exciting

and enticing and romantic

that he begged his mother

to allow him to go and join the pirate crew.

Don't believe everything you read, boy.

Maybe we rob.

Maybe we murder.

Maybe we string up little boys and throw 'em to the sharks.

I don't care, I want to be a pirate.

Then welcome aboard, John King.

John King would probably have found

that his dreams were met with disappointment.

The majority of the time,

pirate life wasn't as exciting as he had seen it when they'd captured him.

Bellamy is fast becoming a rich man...

...and he's doing it at the expense of England's trade

with her American colonies.

The Governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood,

receives reports, how the pirate nest is growing

and hatching more and more pirates,

and that the pirates are becoming a destabilizing danger

to trade and commerce.

Spotswood is the governor of a royal colony that's producing

an incredibly valuable commodity in tobacco,

and so he is responsible for protecting those tobacco fleets.

The entire economy of the Chesapeake Bay

depended on production of tobacco

and its eventual sale back in England.

But worse is to come.

The pirates will soon target the trade

which makes the British Empire tick.

Slavery.

The danger is very clear.

I mean, Spotswood and other governors are all forwarding

increasingly urgent dispatches back to their masters in London.

Starting to clamor with more and more insistence

that something is going to need to be done.

Bellamy isn't the only member of the Flying Gang making waves.

They say that if Anne Bonny takes a shine to you,

you're on the up.

Anne was always looking to build her fortune.

She was always looking for that adventure. Looking for that next best opportunity.

And the man making quite a stir is Edward Thatch,

the Latin-speaking pirate scholar.

At a time when literacy was the exception, not the rule,

Edward Thatch knew how to read and write.

Where'd you learn that?

A book.

You read?

It's amazing what you can find through some pages of Latin poetry.

He kept a journal, which is unlike many of the pirates,

so he's educated and literate and thoughtful,

and understands the need to keep his thoughts.

Who are you?

A frustrated pirate.

A dangerous pirate.

An orphaned son of plantation owners.

I'm nothin'.

I'm nobody.

Thatcher's career has been relatively quiet up to this point.

He's been overlooked for promotion once or twice.

In fact, Bellamy's been given a promotion. Bellamy's a much younger man than he is.

Thatch has played his hand very, very carefully,

always loyal to his mentor, Hornigold.

He is now helping rebuild

the deposed Hornigold's pirate fleet.

Come on, Benjamin. Bring 'em to me, Benjamin.

He is thoughtful, observant, and quite the strategist.

He knew how to manage a ship.

He knew how to manage men.

He really was a man who knew what he was doing.

Faster! Come on!

He makes himself indispensable to Hornigold in a short period of time.

- Load your cannons! - Cannons full.

Prime your weapons!

And while not every chase ends in success,

it isn't long before Hornigold makes good on his promise to Thatch.

It's time to introduce you to your new captain.

They're all yours.

It's speech time.

Gentlemen!

- Pirate scum! - Yay!

- Whore's sons! - Yay!

Out there is an ocean full of big, fat fish waiting to be swallowed.

And we're gonna get so rich, we'll be shittin' gold.

Yay!

For Thatch, it means his first personal command.

It's the beginning of a new pirate legend,

and bad news for the English slave traders.

So, what's the plan?

Take what we can.

No bloodshed, no deaths.

And we need to find ourselves a bigger boat.

He's a well-respected leader and captain,

absolutely fearless as a pirate,

yet, like Bellamy,

there's no record of him ever killing anyone.

There's some brutal violence along the way, undoubtedly,

but there's some other acts of humanity

that speak quite outside of the typical pirate archetype.

Which is interesting.

I never knew you were musical, Caesar.

What you don't know about me could fill a book.

Black Caesar is one of those characters

who has all these wonderful, wonderful stories around him.

Um, one of the best ones is, perhaps, that he was an African prince

before he was captured and sold into slavery.

The trouble is that, in reality, we actually know almost nothing about him,

until he appears on Thatcher's ship.

Slavery is the dirty business that drives British trade.

The slave trade involved taking slaves from Africa

and carrying them across to the Caribbean and to the American colonies

and stocking up there on goods from those regions

and bringing them back to England in a sort of triangular trade.

Imagine, human beings

torn from their families and home,

brutally dragged halfway across the world,

used as human currency,

the price of the West's growing addiction.

There's one word that can explain why slaves were so necessary

to the colonies in the 18th century, and that word is sugar,

which goes from being a luxury to a perceived necessity

to European diets and palates.

Every European nation has

an overseas colony producing sugar.

It's being produced in Brazil, it's being produced in Jamaica,

it's being produced in St. Domingue, which would become Haiti.

But slaves are more than currency.

Once exchanged for sugar,

they are put to work growing more.

It's really backbreaking work.

And it's work that led to a tremendous loss of life,

and did not allow for people, enslaved people,

to do much other than work from sunup to sundown.

From the perspective of the pirates, they're encountering

something they had likely never seen before:

people in inhumanely crowded conditions...

...who have been at sea for months.

They were all chained together below deck, hundreds and hundreds of them,

well beyond capacity.

They couldn't even sit upright.

They were covered in feces, urine, vomit.

This led to rampant disease going through,

particularly dysentery, because of contaminated water.

One in five enslaved people generally died

on the travel through the middle passage.

The slave trade is worth billions of pounds every year

to the money men in London.

Unfortunately for them,

their ships are forced to pass through the pirate waters of the Caribbean.

There was no alternative route. You couldn't just go round the pirates.

So, every ship that sailed would be at risk from pirate attack.

And, suddenly, the circulation flow was being cut off,

it was too dangerous for a lot of vessels

to venture along major trade routes,

especially the ones that were immediately adjacent

to the Bahamas and their pirate lair.

When the pirates start targeting the slave ships,

the merchants' profits take a big hit.

And the bolder the pirates get,

the bigger the armed ships the English merchants need

to protect their lucrative slave trade.

Slave ships required certain characteristics. They needed to be big

so that they could hold the largest number of slaves possible.

They needed to be fast.

Because, the longer they spent at sea crossing the Atlantic,

the more slaves were likely to die on the voyage.

But, above all, they needed to be reasonably well armed,

so that they could defend themselves from pirates and other attacks.

Back at the heart of the British Empire,

leading slave trader Humphry Morice is admiring his latest weapon.

Beautiful, isn't she?

The Whydah will be one of the fastest ships on the sea.

Humphry Morice was a Member of Parliament.

He was also one of the early governors of the Bank of England.

So, he was a very prominent person in British society.

He was also a merchant,

and he commissioned the building of the Whydah,

the slave ship.

The Whydah was a purpose-built slave ship.

It was swift and could carry up to 28 guns.

Eight knots with the wind in her sails.

And she will carry up to 500 slaves across three decks.

She's certainly impressive.

And a sizable investment, too, I imagine.

The ship cost 20,000.

But the slaves should make ten times that amount at auctions.

A tidy profit.

Of course, you'll only make that profit

if Captain Prince here comes back with your ship.

On my honor, sir.

This is just the latest report sent back from Jamaica.

The pirates are getting bolder,

and it appears they are favoring slaving vessels as prize targets.

The Whydah was one of the most advanced and dangerous,

you know, weapon systems out there,

and exactly the sort of vessel that a pirate might want to capture.

There is no way that a bunch of pirates is going to take the Whydah.

Back in the Caribbean,

Bellamy and Williams have seized their biggest prize yet,

a ship called the Sultana, whose captain is deathly ill.

Oh, you're not looking too good, are you?

We'll get you out of here, and no harm will come to your crew.

Get off my ship, you guttersnipes.

Where's your gratitude?

You'll be laughing on the other side of your face.

The Royal Navy is onto you.

It was only a matter of time.

Then perhaps we should lie low for a while.

Or maybe, with this monster,

nobody is gonna wanna fuck with us, hmm?

Bellamy's capture of the Sultana allows him to step up to yet another level.

It really increased his capabilities for piracy.

It increased his armament enormously. And it increased his prestige.

But the British Navy are on the hunt for Bellamy near St. Croix.

HMS Scarborough had received intelligence that Sam Bellamy might be in the area,

and so it was dispatched and patrolling and on the prowl to try to find Bellamy.

Confident they had pirates in their sights, the Navy lets loose.

The British sail away,

convinced they've done lasting damage, and force the pirates to shore.

But, later that evening,

Bellamy does arrive at St. Croix

and its bloody aftermath.

Is that you Martel?

What the fuck happened?

The English whores sunk our fleet.

Navy boys did a proper job on Martel's mob.

They are not messing around anymore.

- Do you think they were looking for us? - That's what I was wondering.

Before they were attacked,

Martel's gang had captured a ship full of slaves.

There's 40 of 'em now, but Martel says

they had another 60 chained in the hold before Scarborough sunk his ship.

So, what are we gonna do with them?

We can use 'em.

For some African slaves,

it opened up a world of possibility

and the potential for freedom and mobility,

and even adventure, in the world of piracy.

Joining the pirate crew wasn't necessarily great,

but it was still an awful lot better than being a slave,

and that would have been a very encouraging step up for them.

The idea that you could have free African men

actually being capable of not only sailing a ship,

but dominating British merchant vessels,

it was terrifying.

It would have destroyed the entire economy.

Black Sam Bellamy continues to be the scourge of the British Empire.

Back in Cape Cod,

his lover, Mary Hallett, is struggling to bring up their baby alone.

My love.

My love.

All right, my darling.

My love?

The baby didn't make it,

and, at the time, the only thing worse than having a baby outside of wedlock

was losing one.

No. No.

No!

She was suspected of having killed the child herself.

I didn't kill her.

Didn't kill her. Didn't kill her. I didn't kill her.

Mary Hallett, you're under arrest.

- I didn't kill her. - Come with me.

I didn't. Didn't kill her.

Black Sam is unaware of Mary's predicament.

But opportunity beckons in the Caribbean

in the form of a colossal slave trading ship.

The Whydah arrived in Port Royal

and then succeeded in selling a human cargo of slaves.

When they left Port Royal and began their final leg back to London,

their ship now loaded with valuable treasure.

Between Hispaniola and Cuba,

the Whydah's lookout spots ships on the horizon.

Captain Lawrence Prince at first thinks

that they must be a Royal Navy detachment.

Shit.

But, pretty soon, he realizes that, no, he's being chased by pirates.

The black flag at the masthead told them what they had in store.

As Bellamy and Williams close in on the Whydah,

they know they have a fight on their hands.

That is a beast with teeth.

Twenty or more cannon.

The things we could do with a ship like that.

The Whydah speeds towards the open ocean,

but Bellamy refuses to give up.

The chase lasts for three days and over 300 miles

before finally Bellamy and his crew get into cannon fire range.

There's three ships against one.

But that big bastard could sink one of us before we take her.

Maybe.

But... we have a weapon

that'll make 'em shit their pants.

Sorted.

As Bellamy's ship pulls alongside the Whydah,

the slave ship's crew face their worst nightmare.

Fuck me!

Bellamy goes with the psychological terror gambit,

maybe 20 or so are Africans, unshackled and armed.

So, for a man who had just carried slaves across the Atlantic,

this would be a terrifying prospect.

Imagine the revenge that these men would want to wreak

on the captain of a slave ship.

Slaves in shackles mean nothing to Captain Prince,

but slaves with cutlasses...

Drop your weapons and lower the sails.

It is a master class in psychological warfare.

When pirates captured merchant ships, often they found sugar, tobacco,

things that had some value,

but are not really exciting,

and not really valuable unless you can trade them.

When they captured the Whydah,

they found the holds were filled with gold.

This was the mother lode,

it was the thing that all pirates dreamed of capturing.

Fuck me.

Fuck!

This is enough to retire on.

Almost enough.

With this much firepower, we could take down anything.

The capture of the Whydah made Bellamy's name.

He's got an enormous flagship.

This was the moment that not only Bellamy, but any pirate would be building towards.

When news gets back to London, all hell breaks loose.

Bloody pirates! Pirates...

The soon-to-be Governor of the Bank of England, Humphry Morice...

Gentlemen.

...has had enough.

Gentlemen,

we have all suffered.

We have all lost to these heathen pirates,

these traitors

who dare to rob our ships,

take our goods

and kidnap good Christian men.

My ship, the Whydah, was taken,

and now the insurers are saying

the premium for my next slaving expedition will be increased.

Even the people who weren't losing ships to the pirates

were still feeling the effects of the pirates.

The pirate menace was becoming such that merchants were afraid to sail,

and that meant that commerce wasn't just being harassed,

it was being cut off.

The pirates are becoming an existential threat to the empires,

not merely a nuisance.

There is a very real danger

that the business of slaving

could become unprofitable,

and indeed

end.

Unless something is done.

That's why I have invited here tonight a man you all know.

A privateer.

A man who has made it his business

to hunt down pirates.

A patriot.

And so, the pirates' nemesis enters the tale.

Gentlemen, Captain Woodes Rogers.

A man who seeks one thing against the pirates.

Revenge.