Stealth was the lifeblood of a pirate ship. To survive, she had to be invisible, anonymous. Pirate captains didn’t publish crew lists or file sailing plans, and they didn’t paint names on the hulls of their ships. Whenever possible, they sailed in secrecy. These measures helped them evade the forces that hunted them, but it also meant that when they sank, they didn’t merely settle to the bottom; they disappeared from existence. No government went looking for them because they belonged to no country. Witnesses to a sinking couldn’t have described the location precisely in any case, as measures
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