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There used to hang in Marienkirche (St Mary’s Church) in Lübeck, over the chair belonging to the Bergenfahrer, a banner that was captured in 1526 from pirates in Skjernesund, a natural harbour on the southernmost coast of Norway. Two Hanse ships, with skippers Karsten Tode ‘the Old’ from Lübeck and Claus Went from Wismar, sailing from Bergen and seeking harbour in Skjernesund, became aware of a crayer in a bay nearby. According to a contemporary account by Gert Korfmaker, the Germans feared that it was a pirate ship, because one of them said that this was a well-known pirates’ nest. But others said: ‘May God have mercy on us, that it is rather a Scotsman loading timber’.1 But pirates they were, and after some struggle the Hansards managed to overcome the pirate ship, whose captain was Marten Pechlin from the island of Fehmarn in the west Baltic; Pechlin himself was killed during the battle, and the surviving pirates were thrown into the sea.2 In certain respects, seafarers had been asking the same question from time immemorial when meeting other, unknown ships: Friend or foe? Trader or pirate? For the Hansards, this was of course a question of great importance when, during their heyday, the trade in fish centred on Bergen in western Norway was of considerable worth to the Hanse. In the traffic between Bergen and the Baltic Region, Skjernesund seems to have been something of a hub, and an important harbour for the Hanse, as well as for pirates. The present paper discusses the place of the south Norwegian coast in Hanseatic seafaring from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth century, a problematic time for seafaring due to war between seafaring nations and widespread piracy. Particular emphasis is given to Skjernesund. All ships sailing between the North Sea and the Baltic had to pass the coast of Agder in the southernmost part of Norway. The state of navigational knowledge in the late medieval period, together with the sailing abilities Pirates and merchants – Hanse traders and Victual Brothers in Skjernesund and other outports of southernmost Norway in the early fifteenth century