I’m reading David Cordingly’s Under The Black Flag, and he makes a point of saying that blacks were viewed as property, that Caribbean pirates from the Golden Age of Piracy were participants in the slave trade. He goes on to dispel the romantic belief that blacks could become officers of a crew or were granted freedom by captains. However, he later mentions Black Caesar, a black pirate who notably served as a Lieutenant on Blackbeard’s crew. Along with popular media (Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, the Starz show Black Sails) depicting pirates freeing slaves or working with blacks to directly oppose the slave trade, Cordingly’s book makes the distinction between buccaneers, privateers, corsairs, privateers, etc. and then promptly throws them out, saying many called Francis Drake all of those terms, depending on their nationality. While I understand at the time a privateer from one nation would be called a pirate by another, I figure any privateers working for an empire that runs on the slave trade are more likely to support the slave trade themselves, so conflating these terms also makes me less confident in his blanket assertion.

Past just whether pirates viewed blacks as slaves or people, I wonder how much variation there was between pirate captains on this view, and whether pirates in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, African Coast, and Indian/South Asian seas held different views? Thank you in advance for your answers!