Pirates
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154 free Pirates trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
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Q 01Which famous female pirate sailed alongside Calico Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny?
Mary Read
Mary Read and Anne Bonny were both sentenced to hang in 1720 but won a reprieve by 'pleading the belly', claiming to be pregnant; Read died in prison the following spring, reportedly of fever.
Q 02Under which name is the pirate Blackbeard usually recorded?
Edward Teach
Edward Teach, also written Thatch, is the name in the records, but it may well have been an alias, so his birth name may never be known.
Q 03What did Blackbeard rename La Concorde, the French slave ship he captured and armed with 40 guns?
Queen Anne's Revenge
Queen Anne's Revenge served him for well under a year: in 1718 he ran her onto a sandbar at Beaufort Inlet, perhaps on purpose to shed crew and keep more loot, and the wreck was found in 1996.
Q 04In pirate lore, what does it mean to 'parley'?
To talk terms with an enemy
To talk terms with an enemy under a truce is to parley, from the French parler, 'to speak'; in Pirates of the Caribbean the heroine invokes it, only for the pirate captain to tell her the code is more guideline than rule.
Q 05Which pirate word first meant the Caribbean hunters who slow-smoked meat on a wooden frame?
Buccaneer
Buccaneer comes from the French boucanier, a user of the 'boucan', a native American word for the smoking frame; the hunters later took up the richer trade of raiding Spanish ships, and the name went with them.
Q 06What iconic symbol commonly associated with pirates features a skull and crossbones?
The Jolly Roger
The Jolly Roger was a message as much as a flag: run up as the pirates closed in, it told a merchant crew who was coming and gave them the chance to give up without a fight.
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 came in three waves: raids on Spanish colonies from the 1650s, the Pirate Round of the 1690s, and a final surge after 1713, when peace left thousands of sailors and privateers out of work.
Q 08What was a 'doubloon' in the context of pirate treasure?
A Spanish gold coin
A Spanish gold coin: the name comes from doblón, from the Spanish for 'double'. Chests of them belong mostly to fiction, since a real pirate haul was usually everyday cargo to be sold in port.
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 10Alexander Graham Bell wanted people to answer his new telephone with which sailors' cry?
Ahoy
Ahoy was Bell's pick for the standard telephone greeting, but his rival Thomas Edison urged callers to say 'hello' instead, and Edison's word won.
Q 11On a ship, what is a gangplank used for?
Boarding or leaving at a pier
Boarding or leaving at a pier is all a gangplank is for; the 'walking the plank' of pirate lore 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 13In sailors' legend, which ghost ship is doomed to sail the oceans for ever without making port?
The Flying Dutchman
Q 21In which 1987 film does farm boy Westley return as the masked 'Dread Pirate Roberts'?
The Princess Bride
The Princess Bride's twist is that Roberts is a job, not a man: each 'Dread Pirate' hands the name and its fearsome reputation to a successor once he is rich enough to retire, and Westley is the latest.
Q 22Which Caribbean pirate haven was largely destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami on 7 June 1692?
Port Royal
Port Royal, once dubbed the Sodom of the New World, lost much of its ground to the sea; survivors founded Kingston across the harbour weeks later, and it took over the trade and grew into the capital.
Q 23The 1710s Republic of Pirates was based at Nassau on New Providence, in which island group?
The Bahamas
The Flying Dutchman is said to appear in storms off the Cape of Good Hope, its captain condemned to beat against the wind until Judgment Day; sailors took a sighting as an omen of doom.
Q 14Which city's baseball team became the Pirates after rivals called its 1891 signing of a disputed player 'piratical'?
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh signed second baseman Lou Bierbauer in 1891 after his old club forgot to reserve him; a rival official called the move 'piratical', and the team took the insult as its name.
Q 15Which actor plays Captain Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean films?
Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Rush played Barbossa in all five films, starting as the mutineer who stole the Black Pearl from Jack Sparrow; killed at the end of the first film, he is brought back from the dead in the sequels.
Q 16What was sailors' rum ration called once mixed with water, as Admiral Vernon ordered in 1740?
Grog
Grog is said to be named after Vernon himself, 'Old Grog' to his men for the grogram cloak he wore; he ordered the rum watered down to cut drunkenness in his fleet.
Q 17Which disease of long sea voyages made sailors' gums bleed and old wounds reopen?
Scurvy
Scurvy is simply a lack of vitamin C, which months without fresh fruit or vegetables brought on; it is estimated to have killed at least two million sailors between 1500 and 1800.
Q 18Which female pirate led the confederation behind the Red Flag Fleet in the early 1800s?
Ching Shih
Ching Shih, also called Zheng Yi Sao, took over her husband's pirate confederation when he died in 1807; she ruled it with his protégé Zhang Bao, who became her deputy and her lover.
Q 19Which short, broad slashing sword was the favoured pirate weapon for fighting on a crowded deck?
Cutlass
The cutlass was short enough to swing in the crush of a deck fight and heavy enough to double as a tool, hacking through rope and rigging in an emergency.
Q 20The Spanish 'piece of eight' of pirate lore was the model for which currency?
The US dollar
The US dollar was defined by Congress in 1792 as equal in value to the Spanish milled dollar, the eight-real coin that Americans already used day to day.
The Bahamas drew out-of-work privateers to Nassau after the War of the Spanish Succession; they raided shipping from there until a royal governor arrived in 1718 to take the town back.
Q 24Which former privateer became governor at Nassau in 1718 and drove the pirates out of the colony?
Woodes Rogers
Woodes Rogers broke the pirates' hold on Nassau but bankrupted himself doing it: he spent time in a debtors' prison back in England before being sent out as governor again in 1728.
Q 25Stede Bonnet, the 'Gentleman Pirate', was a wealthy planter on which island?
Barbados
Barbados was where Bonnet had inherited the family plantation; with no need to steal a ship, he simply paid for one and hired a crew, an almost unheard-of way to turn pirate.
Q 26Which drawing, made beside his stepson on a rainy holiday, grew into Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 pirate classic?
An island map
An island map came first: Stevenson painted it at Braemar while keeping his stepson Lloyd Osbourne amused, liked the look of it, and began writing a pirate story to go with it.
Q 27The Barbary corsair ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli fell under which power's sovereignty?
The Ottomans
The Ottomans' hold was loose: Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli owed the sultan allegiance, yet lived off the tribute that weaker sea powers paid to keep their ships from being seized.
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 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
Jamaica got him back as its lieutenant governor: shipped to London under arrest because the raid had broken a peace treaty with Spain, Morgan was knighted by Charles II instead of being put on trial.