Brethren of the Coast

For the fictionalized version in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, see List of characters in Pirates of the Caribbean § Brethren Court.
Henry Morgan recruiting his brethren for an attack on Portobelo in Panama

The Brethren or Brethren of the Coast were a loose coalition of pirates and buccaneers that were active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico. They mostly operated in two locations, the island of Tortuga off the coast of Haiti and in the city of Port Royal on the island of Jamaica.[1]

The Brethren 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.[2]

  1. ^ Kemp 1961, p. 8.
  2. ^ Thomson 1969, p. 46.