Piracy's peak runs roughly through the 16th to 18th centuries, and this film tracks the era through its most notorious names. Edward Teach, born in Bristol and known as Blackbeard, built his reputation on theater as much as violence, reportedly tying lit matches under his hat to look demonic before a fight, and used that fear to intimidate colonial officials including the governor and chief justice of Carolina until his beheading in 1718. Anne Bonny and Mary Read get equal attention, two women who worked as pirates in a trade built entirely around men, with Read disguising herself as a man to do it. The film also draws the legal line separating pirates from privateers like Sir Francis Drake, who did the same plundering with a monarch's blessing and became a tool of English foreign policy under Elizabeth I. It closes by tracing the throughline from these tall-ship raiders to piracy's modern forms, arguing the practice never actually ended, just changed its ships.