This two-hour episode tells the full story of Claes Compaen, a 17th-century Dutch corsair who became a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy.

He was born in 1587 in Oostzaan in North Holland and first made his name as a merchant and privateer for the Dutch Republic during the Eighty Years’ War.

Frustrated with the limits of privateering, he turned to open piracy in the early 1620s and began taking ships across the English Channel, the Mediterranean, and the West African coast.

Sources say he captured large numbers of prizes and operated with ruthless speed, moving between Dutch, Iberian, and North African waters, and using Salé in Morocco as a base when it suited him.

The record places Compaen in clashes with Dutch captains like Wybrant Schram and in tense encounters with the Dunkirker leader Colaert, moments that reveal the hazards of early modern sea warfare and the tight margins of a pirate’s life. We place these events within broader maritime history, including VOC trade routes, coastal provisioning, and the pirate economy that grew around strongholds such as Salé and Algiers.

We follow Compaen’s arc from ambitious trader to feared sea robber, and then to a man seeking a way back to lawful shores. He eventually returned to the Netherlands and received a formal pardon from Prince Frederik Hendrik, closing a violent chapter that had unsettled European and Mediterranean shipping.

He died back in Oostzaan on 25 February 1660. This episode uses contemporary and modern scholarship to piece together his career and to separate myth from what the sources actually say.

For viewers who enjoy deep dives into Dutch history, naval history, corsairs versus pirates, and long-form storytelling, this is a clear, source-driven guide to a figure you rarely see covered in English.

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