Pirate Brethren of the Coast Flag History

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The Brethren of the Coast were a loose coalition of pirates and privateers
commonly known as buccaneers and active in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.

They were a syndicate of captains with letters of marque and reprisal who
regulated their privateering enterprises within the community of privateers and
with their outside benefactors. They were primarily private individual merchant
mariners of Protestant background usually of English and French origin.

During their heyday when the Thirty Years War was devastating the Protestant
communities of France, Germany, and the Netherlands and England was
engaged in various conflicts, the privateers of these nationalities were issued
letters of marque to raid Catholic French and Spanish shipping and territories.

Based primarily on the island of Tortuga off the coast of Haiti and the city of
Port Royal on the island of Jamaica. The original Brethren were mostly
French Huguenot and British Protestants, but their ranks were joined by other
adventurers of various nationalities including, Spaniards, and even African
sailors, as well as escaped slaves and outlaws of various sovereigns.

In keeping with their Protestant and mostly Common Law heritage the
Brethren were governed by codes of conduct that favored legislative decision-
making, hierarchical command authority, individual rights, and equitable
division of revenues.

Henry Morgan is perhaps the most famous member of the Brethren and the
one usually noted with codifying its organization. However, following the
demographic changes which featured the rise of slave labor in the Caribbean
islands, most maritime families moved to the mainland colonies of the future
United States or to their home countries. A few, unable to compete effectively
with slave labor, enamored of easy riches, or out of angst continued to
maintain the Brethren of the Coasts as a purely criminal organization which
preyed upon all civilian maritime shipping. This second era of the Brethren
began the start of the age of piracy and brigandage which featured the
Caribbean until socioeconomic and military changes of the late 18th and early
19th century finally broke its back.

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