The development of English plunder during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, culminating in a so-called ‘golden age of piracy’, had far-reaching and contradictory consequences for women. Published works from the period described the emergence of groups of professionalized, hardbitten career pirates, the product of an aggressive and alienated outlaw culture, which exposed women to unrestrained predatory behaviour that seemed to flout customary and moral obligations. The anonymous author of The Grand Pyrate of 1676 reported that captain George Cusack, ‘the great Sea-robber’, was captured in bed with a woman, ‘who was brought along with him, forthwith to the Old-Baily. The story was enlivened by the claim that the woman was Cusack's sister. Alexander Exquemelin's The Buccaneers of America, which first appeared in a Dutch edition of 1678, provided a vivid and entertaining collection of anecdotes concerning the debauchery of the rovers who haunted Jamaica. It included an unusual case, which Exquemelin claimed to have witnessed, of a pirate who gave a ‘common strumpet five hundred pieces-of-eight only that he might see her naked’. Furthermore, one of his masters disposed of 3,000 pieces of eight during a brief bout of drinking and womanizing which left him in so much debt that he was sold into servitude. Such behaviour appeared to plumb new depths in the account of the career of Edward Teach by captain Charles Johnson. In his popular and influential History of the Pyrates, Johnson claimed that Teach married fourteen wives, the last of whom, a young woman of sixteen, was forced ‘to prostitute herself’ to his companions, ‘one after another, before his Face’.