Pirates
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125 free Pirates trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Set sail through pirate history with 35 free pirate trivia questions and answers. The set covers the legendary names of the Golden Age of Piracy, from Blackbeard and Captain Kidd to Anne Bonny, Mary Read and Bartholomew Roberts, plus the ships they sailed, the havens they hid in and the ports that hunted them down. You will also meet privateers like Francis Drake and Henry Morgan, the Barbary corsairs of North Africa, Ching Shih's Red Flag Fleet, and the pirate vocabulary of doubloons, grog, cutlasses and marooning. Difficulty ranges from easy warm-ups to questions that will test a real buccaneer buff. Every answer is checked against a cited source, so this works for pub quizzes, classrooms and Talk Like a Pirate Day alike. Play online for free and see how many you get right.
30 of 125 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which famous female pirate sailed alongside Calico Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny?
Mary Read
Both women escaped the gallows in 1720 by 'pleading the belly'; Read died in prison in Spanish Town, Jamaica, the following year, probably of fever.
Q 02What was the birth name of the infamous pirate Blackbeard?
Edward Teach
Blackbeard was born Edward Teach (also spelled Thatch), probably in Bristol around 1680; he was killed in a boarding action off Ocracoke, North Carolina, in November 1718.
Q 03What did Blackbeard rename La Concorde, the French slave ship he captured and armed with 40 guns?
Queen Anne's Revenge
He renamed La Concorde the Queen Anne's Revenge; she ran aground in Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, in June 1718, and divers located the wreck there in 1996.
Q 04In pirate lore, what does it mean to 'parley'?
To talk terms with an enemy
To parley is to talk terms with an enemy under a truce; the word comes from the French 'parler', to speak, and Pirates of the Caribbean turned it into a joke clause of the Pirate Code.
Q 05Which pirate word originally meant the Caribbean hunters who slow-smoked meat on a wooden frame, from an Arawak word for that frame?
Buccaneer
Buccaneer comes from the Arawak 'buccan', the wooden frame on which Tainos and Caribs smoked meat, often manatee; the name moved to the Anglo-French raiders of Spanish shipping.
Q 06What iconic symbol commonly associated with pirates features a skull and crossbones?
The Jolly Roger
The Jolly Roger with a skull and crossbones was flown in the 1710s by captains such as Samuel Bellamy, Edward England and John Taylor, and has stood for pirates ever since.
Q 07Historians give what name to the 1650s–1730s, when pirates were a real force in the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans?
The Golden Age of Piracy
The Golden Age of Piracy had three waves: a buccaneering phase, the Pirate Round of the 1690s, and a final surge after the War of the Spanish Succession left thousands of sailors jobless.
Q 08What was a 'doubloon' in the context of pirate treasure?
A Spanish gold coin
A doubloon was a Spanish gold coin: the name means 'double', a two-escudo piece worth about four Spanish dollars, minted in Spain and its American viceroyalties.
Q 09What exactly is a 'sea shanty'?
Work songs sung by sailors
Work songs sung by sailors hauling on ropes, sea shanties belong to 19th-century merchant ships far more than to pirates; the shantyman called and the crew heaved on the chorus.
Q 10What is the pirate-speak phrase 'Ahoy, matey!' roughly equivalent to?
Hello, friend!
Alexander Graham Bell wanted 'ahoy' as the standard way to answer a telephone; Thomas Edison's 'hello' won.
Q 11On a ship, what is a gangplank used for?
Boarding or leaving at a pier
A gangplank is the movable board for boarding or leaving a ship at a pier; the pirate-lore 'walking the plank' is almost entirely fiction, with only a handful of recorded cases.
Q 12Which pirate began with a 1695 royal commission to hunt pirates and French ships, only to hang at Execution Dock in 1701?
Captain Kidd
Captain Kidd's rope broke on the first attempt at Execution Dock in 1701, and his tarred body was then left on display over the Thames for years as a warning.
Q 13Which sea was the main hunting ground for pirates in the early 1700s?
The Caribbean
Q 21Which Welsh pirate took over 400 prizes before dying in battle with HMS Swallow in 1722?
Bartholomew Roberts
Bartholomew Roberts, 'Black Bart', took more than 400 prizes, many of them small fishing boats, before a broadside from HMS Swallow killed him off Cape Lopez on 10 February 1722.
Q 22Which Jamaican pirate haven was largely destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami on 7 June 1692?
Port Royal
Port Royal, once called the wickedest city on Earth, sank partly into the harbour; the disaster led directly to the founding of Kingston, which took over its trade and became Jamaica's capital in 1872.
Q 23The 1710s Republic of Pirates was based at Nassau on New Providence, in which island group?
The Bahamas
The Caribbean: bases such as Port Royal in Jamaica and New Providence in the Bahamas sat beside the Spanish treasure routes, and Nassau ran as a pirate republic from about 1706 to 1718.
Q 14What was the most common form of capital punishment for captured pirates?
Hanging
Hanging: sailors called it 'dancing the hempen jig', and in England most pirate hangings took place at Execution Dock in Wapping, with crowds watching as at a sporting event.
Q 15Which pirate reportedly wore lit fuses under his hat to terrify his prey?
Blackbeard
Blackbeard tucked lit slow-match fuses under his hat to wreath his face in smoke; for all the theatre he relied on that fearsome image, and no record shows him killing a captive before his final fight in 1718.
Q 16What was sailors' rum ration called once mixed with water, as Admiral Vernon ordered in 1740?
Grog
The name is said to come from Vernon's nickname 'Old Grog', after the grogram cloak he wore; the ratio was four parts water to one of rum.
Q 17Which disease, brought on by months at sea without fresh fruit or vegetables, made gums bleed and old wounds reopen?
Scurvy
Scurvy is simply a lack of vitamin C, and it is estimated to have killed at least two million sailors between 1500 and 1800 before citrus rations solved it.
Q 18Which female pirate commanded the Red Flag Fleet in the early 1800s?
Ching Shih
Ching Shih (also known as Zheng Yi Sao) was a formidable pirate queen who commanded the Red Flag Fleet, an armada of over 1,200 ships and tens of thousands of pirates, dominating the South China Sea.
Q 19Which short, broad slashing sword was the favoured pirate weapon for fighting on a crowded deck?
Cutlass
The cutlass descended from the medieval falchion, and being short and robust it was as handy for hacking through rigging as through opponents.
Q 20What was a 'piece of eight'?
A Spanish silver coin
A piece of eight was a Spanish silver coin worth eight reales; it was legal tender in the United States until 1857 and is the ancestor of the dollar sign.
New Providence is in the Bahamas; unemployed privateers flooded into Nassau after the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1713, and the 1715 Spanish treasure fleet wrecked off nearby Florida.
Q 24Which former privateer became governor at Nassau in 1718 and drove the pirates out of the colony?
Woodes Rogers
His first term ruined him financially, and he was jailed for debt on his return to England before being reappointed in 1728.
Q 25Stede Bonnet, the 'Gentleman Pirate', was a wealthy planter on which island?
Barbados
Bonnet was a sugar planter on Barbados; he inherited the family estate in 1694 and, unusually for a pirate, bought his ship rather than stealing one.
Q 26Which author wrote Treasure Island, the 1883 novel that introduced the one-legged cook Long John Silver?
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson serialised Treasure Island in Young Folks in 1881-82; Cassell & Co. published it in book form on 14 November 1883.
Q 27The Barbary corsair ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli fell under which power's sovereignty?
The Ottomans
The Barbarossa brothers, Hayreddin and Oruc Reis, seized Algiers for the Ottomans in the early 16th century.
Q 28What government licence let a privateer legally attack and capture enemy ships?
Letter of marque
A letter of marque licensed a privateer to seize enemy ships; the same act without the paperwork was piracy, so the document could be the difference between a hero's welcome and the gallows.
Q 29Francis Drake was knighted by Elizabeth I in 1581 aboard which ship?
Golden Hind
The Golden Hind, originally the Pelican, was renamed mid-voyage in honour of Sir Christopher Hatton, whose crest featured a golden hind; Drake was knighted aboard her at Deptford on 4 April 1581.
Q 30Henry Morgan sacked Panama City in 1671 and was later appointed lieutenant governor of which colony?
Jamaica
Morgan was knighted in 1674 and made lieutenant governor of Jamaica in 1675; a former shipmate's memoir later accused him of torture at Panama, and Morgan sued its English publishers for libel.