Buccaneer (Pirates) 1620-1670 1/72 Scale Plastic Model Kit Mars Figures 72082

The earliest known literary reference to the "Golden Age" of piracy is in 1894, when the English journalist George Powell wrote "that this time seems to have been the Golden Age of Piracy until the last decade of the seventeenth century." Powell uses the phrase when reviewing Charles Leslie's book A New and Accurate History of Jamaica. The name then refers mainly to such events in the 1660s as Henry Morgan's attacks on Maracaibo and Portobelo and the famous rescue of Bartolomeo of Portugal. Powell uses this phrase only once.
In 1897, a more systematic use of the phrase "The Golden Age of Piracy" was introduced by historian John Fiske. He wrote: “At no other time in the history of the world did piracy flourish so strongly as in the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth. It can be said that his Golden Age extends from approximately 1650 to 1720. Fiske included Barbary corsairs and East Asian pirates in this period, noting that "since these Muslim and Asiatic pirates were as active in the seventeenth century as at any other time, their presence does not contradict my statement that the era of the buccaneers was the Golden Age piracy." Fiske does not cite Powell or any other source that mentions the notion of a "Golden Age".
Pirate historians of the first half of the 20th century sometimes adopted Fisk's term "Golden Age" without respecting dates for its duration. The broadest time frame for piracy was specified in a definition by Patrick Pringle who wrote in 1951 that "The greatest flowering in the history of piracy ... began under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ended in the second decade of the eighteenth century." This idea ran counter to Fiske, who vehemently denied that Elizabethan figures such as Francis Drake were pirates.