Pirates had their own injury insurance.

1720

Crew articles set in advance how much a man would get for losing an arm or a leg in battle — and the captain was chosen by vote.

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The event

• The Republic of Piratesc. 1706–1718 · Nassau. In the early 1700s pirates took over New Providence island, home to Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Anne Bonny and hundreds more. Order rested on pirate articles, and captains were elected. In 1718 Governor Woodes Rogers arrived offering royal pardons, and the republic collapsed.

18th century

More amazing facts

• 1718 Blackbeard held the people of a whole city hostage — and asked for a chest of medicine.
• 1718 · 1727 Blackbeard and Isaac Newton were contemporaries.
• 1720 Two women pirates escaped the gallows because they were pregnant.
• 1720 Isaac Newton lost a fortune in a stock bubble.
• 1721 Boston learned smallpox inoculation from an enslaved African man. Onesimus told his owner, the minister Cotton Mather, that this was how people at home protected themselves, and in the 1721 epidemic the inoculated died far less often.
• 1722 · 1795 The Chinese emperor Qianlong abdicated so as not to reign longer than his grandfather.

All amazing facts (1058) →