Pirate Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

Pirate trivia quiz with answers about Pirates.

Pirate Trivia Quiz Questions With Answers

What is a pirate?
A: One who engages in acts of piracy.

What is Piracy?
A: Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and other valuable items or properties.

The earliest documented instances of piracy were in the 14th century BC, when the Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders, attacked what?
A: The ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilizations.

Narrow channels which funnel shipping into predictable routes have long created opportunities for piracy, as well as for what?
A: Privateering and commerce raiding.

What are some historic examples?
A: The waters of Gibraltar, the Strait of Malacca, Madagascar, the Gulf of Aden, and the English Channel, whose geographic structures facilitated pirate attacks.

Piracy does not normally include crimes committed against people traveling on what?
A: The same vessel as the perpetrator (e.g. one passenger stealing from others on the same vessel).

Piracy or pirating is the name of a specific crime under customary international law and also the name of a number of crimes under what?
A: The municipal law of a number of states.

In the early 21st century, seaborne piracy against transport vessels remains a significant issue with estimated worldwide losses of how much?
A: US$16 billion per year in 2004.

Today, pirates are typically armed with what?
A: Automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades.

They use small motorboats to attack and what?
A: Board ships, a tactic that takes advantage of the small number of crew members on modern cargo vessels and transport ships.

They also use larger vessels, known as "what", to supply the smaller motorboats?
A: Mother ships.

The international community is facing many challenges in bringing modern pirates to justice, as these attacks often occur where?
A: In international waters.

Some nations have used what to protect private ships from pirate attacks and to pursue pirates?
A: Their naval forces.

Some private vessels use armed security guards, high-pressure hoses or sound cannons to do what?
A: To repel boarders, and use radar to avoid potential threats.

Where does the English word "pirate" come from?
A: The Latin term purateivitia ("sailor, corsair, sea robber").

As early as 258 AD, the Gothic-Herulic fleet ravaged towns on what coasts?
A: The Black Sea and Sea of Marmara.

What coast suffered similar attacks a few years later?
A: The Aegean coast.

In the Roman province of Britannia, who was captured and enslaved by Irish pirates?
A: Saint Patrick.

The most widely known and far-reaching pirates in medieval Europe were whom?
A: The Vikings, seaborne warriors from Scandinavia who raided and looted mainly between the 8th and 12th centuries, during the Viking Age in the Early Middle Ages.

Toward the end of the 9th century, Moorish pirate havens were established where?
A: Along the coast of southern France and northern Italy.

In 846, what did Moor raiders sack?
A: The extra muros Basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Rome.

The earliest documented instances of piracy are the exploits of whom?
A: The Sea Peoples who threatened the ships sailing in the Aegean and Mediterranean waters in the 14th century BC.

In classical antiquity, the Phoenicians, Illyrians and Tyrrhenians were known as what?
A: Pirates.

In the pre-classical era, the ancient Greeks condoned piracy as a what?
A: A viable profession; it apparently was widespread and "regarded as an entirely honorable way of making a living".

Among some of the most famous ancient pirateering peoples were whom?
A: The Illyrians, a people populating the western Balkan peninsula.

Constantly raiding the Adriatic Sea, the Illyrians caused many conflicts with whom?
A: The Roman Republic.

On one voyage across the Aegean Sea in 75 BC, who was kidnapped and briefly held by Cilician pirates and held prisoner in the Dodecanese islet of Pharmacusa?
A: Julius Caesar.

Mediterranean piracy was conducted almost entirely with what type of ships?
A: Galleys until the mid-17th century, when they were gradually replaced with highly maneuverable sailing vessels such as xebecs and brigantines.

They were, however, of a smaller type than battle galleys, often referred to as what?
A: Galiots or fustas.

Pirate galleys were small, nimble, lightly armed, but often heavily manned in order to do what?
A: To overwhelm the often minimal crews of merchant ships.

In general, pirate craft were extremely difficult for patrolling craft to what?
A: To actually hunt down and capture.

Using what type of vessels to combat pirates was common, and was even practiced by the major powers in the Caribbean?
A: Oared vessels.

When were purpose-built galleys (or hybrid sailing vessels) built by the English in Jamaica?
A: In 1683 and by the Spanish in the late 16th century.

Specially-built sailing frigates with oar-ports on the lower decks, like the James Galley and Charles Galley, and oar-equipped sloops proved highly useful for what?
A: For pirate hunting, though they were not built in sufficient numbers to check piracy until the 1720s.

The expansion of Muslim power through the Ottoman conquest of large parts of the eastern Mediterranean in the 15th and 16th century resulted in what?
A: Extensive piracy on sea trading.

The so-called Barbary corsairs began to operate out of North African ports in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Morocco around 1500, preying primarily on what?
A: The shipping of Christian powers, including massive slave raids at sea as well as on land.

Modern pirates can be successful because a large amount of international commerce occurs via what?
A: Ocean shipping.

Major shipping routes take cargo ships through narrow bodies of water such as the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Malacca making them vulnerable to what?
A: To be overtaken and boarded by small motorboats.

As usage increases, many of these ships have to lower cruising speeds to allow for navigation and traffic control, making them what?
A: Prime targets for piracy.

Also, pirates often operate in regions of developing or struggling countries that have what?
A: Smaller navies and large trade routes.

Pirates sometimes evade capture by sailing into waters controlled by whom?
A: Their pursuer's enemies.

Modern pirates are sometimes linked with organized-crime syndicates, but often are what?
A: Small individual groups.

Who maintains statistics regarding pirate attacks dating back to 1995?
A: The International Maritime Bureau (IMB).

Their records indicate hostage-taking overwhelmingly dominates what?
A: The types of violence against seafarers.

How many attacks were there in 2006?
A: There were 239 attacks, 77 crew members were kidnapped and 188 taken hostage but only 15 of the pirate attacks resulted in murder.

In 2007 the attacks rose by how much?
A: 10 percent to 263 attacks.

There was a 35 percent increase on reported attacks involving what?
A: Guns.

Crew members that were injured numbered 64 compared to how many in 2006?
A: Just 17

Rather than cargo, modern pirates have targeted what?
A: The personal belongings of the crew and the contents of the ship's safe, which potentially contains large amounts of cash needed for payroll and port fees.

In other cases, the pirates force the crew off the ship and then sail it to a port to be what?
A: Repainted and given a new identity through false papers purchased from corrupt or complicit officials.

Since 2008, Somali pirates centered in the Gulf of Aden made about how much money annually?
A: $120 million.

By September 2012, the heyday of piracy in the Indian Ocean was reportedly what?
A: Over.

Backers were now reportedly reluctant to finance pirate expeditions due to what?
A: The low rate of success, and pirates were no longer able to reimburse their creditors.