REDBEARD

Red-beard story starts at the village Palaiokipos on the Ottoman island of Midilli (Lesbos, nowadays Greece) in the year 1478.  His parents were married and had two daughters and four sons: Ishak, Oruç, Khizr and Ilyas.  At adulthood, All four brothers became seamen, engaged in marine affairs and international sea trade. 

The brothers, initially worked as sailors starting at the age of 10, turned soon into privateers in the Mediterranean, to counteract the privateering of the Knights Hospitaller, (Christian Knights of St. John). 

Amongst the brothers: Oruç and Ilyas operated in the est, between Anatolia, Syria and Egypt; Khizr operated in the Aegean Sea and based his operations mostly in Thessaloniki; Ishak, the eldest, remained on Mytilene, involved with the financial affairs of the family business. 

Oruç was the first of the brothers to become a very successful seaman in the early years of his career.  Speaking Italian, Spanish, French, Greek and Arabic is vision of the world enlarged, as much as his influence on the seas. Victory by victory he gained influence but not yet the name that crossed the border of languages and leap to history… 

CHING SHIH

Shih Yang is born poor in 1775 in Guangdong province. She was a Cantonese prostitute, or better say madame, who worked in a floating brothel in Guangzhou. Her beauty and good instinct for deeds exposed her to men of any kind. Soon enough she was known for her shrewd business knowledge and capacity in gaining trade secrets of her wealthy and political clientele through ‘pillow talk’. A great opportunity to personally profit by dealing directly with them as intermediary at the border of society. 

In 1801 she married Cheng I, a notorious pirate. He consolidated her influential role and granted her with 50% share and control over his pirate fleet. When her husband died years later, Ching Shih immediately began to manoeuvre her way into his leadership position.

Once she held the fleet with the support of her husband’s generals, Under her command, Ching Shih finalized her husband's political role of uniting the remaining Cantonese fleet by issuing a code of laws. Three regulations for her own fleet, called san-t'iao.

Now leading over 300 boats manned up to 40,000 pirates she established hegemony over many coastal villages… 

WATERGEUZEN

Starting around the 16th century, the Watergeuzen became a movement. They were previous nobil men seeking redemption and fighting for a life that was taken from them. Their anger against the Spanish king and the absence of a supportive government who instead mistreated them, drove them to become the most famous dutch pirate group of the sea till this day. However cruel de watergeuzen were seen in battle, however more beautiful they made the dutch culture stand out. Kickstarting the Golden age, their impact is still very much present today within liberal values.

It all began when Holland was still part of Spain. The regime of Spanish ‘King Filips the second’ was not to the liking of most noble citizens. He requested extreme taxations, and his catholic ideas raised the fight against the growing Calvinist intention in Holland.

When dutch lords addressed their anger in a protest letter to Philips deputy they were quickly labeled as ‘gueux', which translates to beggars.

This act of resistance also caused a change in regulations making a large number of Calvinists leave the Spanish Netherlands voluntarily or forcibly, usually with the confiscation of their goods as consequence.

Many of these exiles and insurgents became active at sea. Adopting the swear word gueux as an honorary name, they proudly became known as the watergeuzen. Till this day, the dutch expression geuzen naam is a name of honor given to oneself, although it was originally used by others as an epithet or mocking name…

SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS

Widely known by his nom de guerre - Sub comandante Marcos. He referred to himself also as: Delegate Zero, during the 2006 Mexican Presidential Campaign. And, Maestro Galeano, after declaring the death of his character in mask. 

But the man, Guillén, was born on 19 June 1957, in Tampico, Mexico, to Alfonso Guillén and Maria del Socorro Vincente. He was the fourth of eight children. The father, owned a chain of furniture stores, and the family is usually described – including by Guillén himself – as middle class.

Marcos earned a degree in sociology, and a master's degree in philosophy. Later, he began working as a professor at the same Autonomous Metropolitan University while finishing his dissertation at U.N.A.M. As soon he got in touch with the Forces of National Liberation he saw a way “to walk his talk”, an intuition of his own path, leading him to leave the chair at the university, join the mother organization by moving to Chapas in 1984, and setting up a pirate radio for undercover communications, which will later become the E.Z.L.N. 

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation was founded in the Lacandon Jungle in 1983, initially functioning as a self-defense unit dedicated to protecting Chapas' Mayan people…

ABSHIR BOYAH

Abshir Boyah, is born in Eyl, a pirate den on the coast of Somalia. Living in a country unstable and on the verge of a civil war, he dropped out of school in third grade, and became a lobster fisherman. Was not so long after that he decided to take action, and participate in one of the independent coastguards rising in Somalia. 

For the rest of the world he became a notorious Somalian pirate, by taking up hijacking as activity, going after the illegal fishing by foreign trawlers, who have destroyed his and many others livelihood in the mid-1990s.

Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia's last functional government and navy in 1991, the second longest coastline of Africa has been ever since pillaged by foreign vessels. So for Boyah, amongst many others Somali fishermen, unable to avoid the intruders illegal business, started chasing off illegal trawlers from Somali waters as protector of the coasts. 

A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the official country's coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international "free for all," with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country's own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen.  

These groups, led by captains such as Boyah itself, by using small boats…