privateer
Example Sentences
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The game follows Kenway, also from Swansea, as he sails to the Caribbean as a privateer looking for wealth, and evolves into a pirate, then assassin.
From BBC ● Jul. 8, 2026
She either became a privateer herself, taking to the Mediterranean Sea to attack Spanish holdings such as Gibraltar, or she licensed privateers to attack Spain in her name.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 2, 2024
His father, Jan Jansen, a Dutch privateer, was captured by one of the Moorish states in 1618.
From New York Times ● Dec. 3, 2019
The San Juan Bautista, a Spanish ship transporting enslaved Africans, was bound for Mexico when it was attacked by the White Lion and another privateer, the Treasurer, and forced to surrender its African prisoners.
From The Guardian ● Aug. 14, 2019
He’d had a running fight with a French privateer and had lost three men.
From "Carry On, Mr. Bowditch" by Jean Lee Latham
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The private security forces that some shippers engage today to prevent piracy could do the work of privateers.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 15, 2026
She either became a privateer herself, taking to the Mediterranean Sea to attack Spanish holdings such as Gibraltar, or she licensed privateers to attack Spain in her name.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 2, 2024
In theory, pirates plunder and pillage outside the law, while corsairs were privateers regulated by authorities.
From National Geographic ● Jan. 11, 2024
The privateers were sponsored by the state, and set a ransom of 500 Guineas for Capt Lambton who was sailing The Stephenson from Bristol to Newcastle at the time.
From BBC ● May 17, 2023
On the one hand, the country was already waging an undeclared war against French privateers in the Atlantic and Caribbean.
From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis
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An 1856 treaty purported to ban privateering, but the U.S. refused to sign.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 15, 2026
All of this sounds very nice and would no doubt be an improvement from the privateering corporate status quo.
From Slate ● May 9, 2024
The Protestant queen wanted colonies that would act as an ideological counterweight to Spanish Catholicism in the Americas and provide a base of operations for privateering expeditions that would raid Spanish shipping.
From Textbooks ● Dec. 14, 2022
While the practice known as privateering is archaic, the idea has come up in recent decades.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 3, 2022
In 1619, the first Africans arrived in the Virginia colony on a privateering ship.
From "Blood on the River" by Elisa Carbone
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Vocabulary lists containing privateer
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Chapter 6: The American Revolution
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Torpedoed
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