Images

The fortress built by Jean Le Vasseur from 1642 on the island of Tortuga (Ile de la Tortue), located in northwest Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Tortuga became a major haven for the buccaneers like François L'Olonias...

A late-19th century cigarette card showing the French buccaneer and pirate François L'Olonais (1630-1668). L'Olonias was the cruellest of all buccaneers, torturing and executing almost all of his captives during a brutal career attacking...

A 17th century illustration of François L’Olonais (1630-1668), the infamous French buccaneer who terrorized the Spanish Main. (From an early edition of The Buccaneers of America by Alexander Exquemelin)

A number of cannons at the 16-17th-century fortress of Cartagena, Colombia. Cartagena was one of the principal treasure ports of the Spanish Main and its mighty fortress was sufficient to deter the buccaneers.

An early 20th-century illustration by Howard Pyle showing a buccaneer. The buccaneers terrorized the Spanish Main from 1620 to 1697. (From Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish...

An early 20th-century illustration by Howard Pyle showing buccaneers obliging prisoners to reveal the whereabouts of their valuables in Cartagena. The buccaneers terrorized the Spanish Main from 1620 to 1697. (From Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates...

Illustration from the Russian folktale The Frog Princess, by Ivan Bilibin, 1899.

Illustration from the Russian folk tale The Frog Princess, by Ivan Bilibin, 1930.

A map depicting the two transatlantic voyages of Amerigo Vespucci between 1499 and 1502. It is based on the 1507 map by Martin Waldseemüller, a German clergyman and cartographer, which first referred to the southern hemisphere where...

Silver bust of the Greco-Egyptian deity Serapis, Roman, 2nd century CE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.