Conclusion
Perhaps more than thieves on land, pirates used violence to wrest booty from their victims or to steal bodies for ransom. Some sea raiders struck in the name of religion or nation, or simple revenge, but violence was a means to a material end.
The fact that these crimes of battery, theft, rape or murder were committed at sea spurred the imaginations of landlubbers who cast pirates as exotic figures, either romanticising or dehumanising them. The few surviving documents written from the pirates' point of view suggest these images were rarely in line with self-perception. The opening of the world's seas in the wake of Columbus gave space to many violent impulses, often driven by the sacred hunger for gold. Suppressing those impulses in the name of law and property proved equally violent.
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