Which Man Would Grow Up to be a Pirate? A Privateer? Read the following two descriptions and decide which person was the pirate and which person was the privateer. Mark your choice on your worksheet as Activity #2. Then click ahead to find out if you are correct. After you have made your decisions, go to the next page to learn the truth. Choice #1 Choice #1 was born on July 6, 1747, in Kirkcudbright, Scotland. He was the son of a Scottish gardener. At the age of 12, he entered the British merchant marine and went to sea for the first time as a cabin boy. He sailed aboard merchantmen and slavers, becoming a first mate on a slaver brigantine by 1766 and receiving his first command in 1769. In 1773, as the commander of a merchant vessel, he killed a mutinous crewman at Tobago in the West Indies. Rather than stay in prison and wait for trial, he fled to North America. A fugitive from British justice, he attempted to conceal his identity. Choice #2 Choice #2 was born in Bristol, England. He was thought to have been active as a privateer for the British during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13). The following year he converted a captured French merchantman into a 40-gun warship. In 1718 he established his base in a North Carolina inlet, forcibly collected tolls from shipping in Pamlico Sound, and made a prize-sharing agreement with the royal governor of the North Carolina colony. At the request of Carolina planters, the lieutenant governor of Virginia dispatched a British naval force that succeeded in killing him. It is claimed that at one time he kept eleven of the most prominent citizens of Charleston as hostage for several days until the city finally paid his ransom demand. His demand? He asked for medicine and nothing more. He became an imposing figure in American folklore. It was said that his skull was plated with silver and turned into a drinking vessel.

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