Since when Christopher Columbus first came into the Americas, the specter of private violence stood nearby. This thesis argues that the accounts of navigations left by the privateers, pirates and buccaneers of the XVI and XVII centuries were crucial parts for the making of the European imaginary about the New World, its inhabitants, and the European place in it. We explore the diversity of accounts that, each in its own way, represents the political dilemmas that came to a close at the Modern Estate and the Modern political subjects. This process, thought, should not be represented as an unambiguous tale of progressive civilization. On the contrary, the reading of the accounts of navigation reveals a much more ambiguous and frequently contradictory experience. The scope of this thesis encompass the XVI and XVII centuries. During this time, the late medieval social and political institutions that mediated the relations between society and individuals were at a steady decline. The discoveries made by the Spanish and the Portuguese and the following re-imagination of global geography only aggravated the problem, and from the ashes of the late medieval system modernity arose. We argue that the pirate figure was a central actor in this process acting from the margins. During this thesis we explore the accounts of Andre Thevet and Jean de Léry, Francis drake, Anthony Knivet, Alexander Exquemeling and the novel Robinson Crusoé, from Daniel Defoe. Each one of these accounts brought something new to the complex operations that were taking place in those transitional centuries.