Piracy

The crime of piracy was a pervasive enterprise in the Americas during the 17th and 18th centuries. Although in the 16th century pirates often acted as de facto national military extensions of the developing transatlantic empires of the Spanish, Dutch, French and British, by the 18th century they consisted largely of multinational, lower-class crews that preyed on their former benefactors. Culminating in the violent deaths of Bartholomew Roberts, William Kidd, and Edward Teach (“Blackbeard”) in the early 1700s, the colonial nations effectively ended the “golden age” of piracy.

The advent of the Elizabethan “Sea Dogs” such as Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish in the 16th century signaled the beginning of the close alliance of the emerging European nation-state and piracy. As quasi-legal privateers, the “Sea Dogs” operated under a royal “letter of marque and reprisal” that licensed the attack and seizure of foreign vessels and goods. The rise of English privateers coincided with England’s increasing belligerency toward Spanish control of the Americas; it allowed the English sovereigns simultaneously to weaken the Spanish Empire, fill the royal coffers, and save the cost of building and maintaining a standing navy. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 initiated a period of English pride and maritime confidence.

An illustration of Edward Teach (Blackbeard), from Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates, 1724 (Library of Congress)

With the decline of the Spanish Empire in the mid-17th century (and thus the decreasing need for privateers), a new generation of pirates developed, operating mainly in the CARIBBEAN. These “buccaneers,” from the French word boucanier, centered around Jamaica, particularly Port Royal. The buccaneers preyed mercilessly on Spanish fleets and towns in Central and South America, quickly gaining a reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness. Although often led by Englishmen, buccaneer crews were multiethnic and represented a variety of social classes.

Perhaps the most famous of the buccaneers was Welshman Sir Henry Morgan (ca. 1635-88) who rose through the ranks of the Jamaican privateers to lead attacks on the Spanish towns of Puerto Principe in Cuba (1668), Maracaibo in Venezuela (1669), and Portobello in Panama (1671). Morgan helped established the English presence in the Caribbean for which he was knighted by Charles II and made deputy governor of Jamaica in 1674. Dutchman Alexander Olivier Exquemelin documented the exploits of buccaneers such as Morgan, Franpois L’Olonnais, and others in 1681 in the widely popular History of the Buccaneers of America.

The decades from the 1680s to the 1720s marked the “golden age of piracy,” when the most renowned and famous of all pirates operated, especially along the North American coast. Their exploits, chronicled by Captain Charles Johnson (perhaps a pen name for novelist Daniel Defoe) in A General History of the Pyrates (1724), inspired today’s popular representations of piracy.

At least since the founding of the North American colonies, pirates raided coastal colonial cities and ships. In 1621 French pirates stole the Pilgrim’s first shipment of materials to England. BoSTON-based pirate Dixey Bull raided the newly founded towns of coastal MASSACHUSETTS in 1631. Nevertheless, these pirates remained minor threats until the 1690s, when the establishment of trade routes linked lucrative markets in the Atlantic world.

Many pirates, finding the Spanish in the Caribbean now heavily armed, also struck out at new targets beyond the Atlantic world, notably unprotected shipping in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, where convoys of Muslims making pilgrimages to Mecca provided easy targets. Pirate captain Thomas Tew of Rhode Island arrived in Newport in April 1694, his sloop Amity filled with gold, silver, and ivory from the capture of an Indian treasure ship. English captain Henry Avery scored one of the largest prizes in history when he and his crew captured the Fateh Muhammed and the Gunjsawai in 1695.

The Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston ports often welcomed pirates and provided them with safe harbors, since pirates visiting these ports were quick to spend their share of treasure. This was the easiest, and sometimes only, source of hard currency to come by in the English colonies. William Markham, the lieutenant-governor of PENNSYLVANIA from 1694 to 1699, had a reputation for being the pirates “Steddy Friend.” Governor Sir William Phips of Massachusetts was rumored to have invited pirates to Boston from Philadelphia. Rhode Island was widely considered “the chief refuge for pyrates” in New England. Governor Benjamin Fletcher of New York and merchant Frederick Philipse made fortunes from trading with the pirates based in Madagascar. Pirates were also tolerated in the coastal inlets and islands of the Carolinas.

Nevertheless, this widespread “freebooting” led to the loss of royal customs revenue and merchant profits. After a series of amnesty and pardons failed to suppress piracy in the colonies, the English government commissioned viceadmiralty courts throughout English possessions in 1696 and passed the “Act for More Effectual Suppression of Piracy” in 1700 to stem the increasing profit losses from the pirate raids. Ironically, the government in London commissioned Captain William Kidd of subsequent fame to hunt down pirates in the Indian Ocean, but he turned pirate himself. His former patron, the Earl of Bellomont, who was governor of Massachusetts at the time, arrested Kidd in 1699 in Boston and sent him to London as a sign of Bellomont’s loyalty to the Crown. Kidd was tried, found guilty, and executed. Several years later, in 1704, Captain John Quelch, while attempting to return home with his spoil, was captured, tried, and executed in Boston for piracy. An all-out war against the pirates now began.

A second generation of “golden age” pirates arose with the subsequent unemployment of sailors following the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713. This generation of pirates was indiscriminate and ruthless. Captain Edward Teach, or “Blackbeard,” terrorized the Virginia and Carolina coasts until his death during a battle off the North Carolina coast in 1718. Captain Stede Bonnet, the gentleman turned pirate, vacillated between piracy and legitimate PRIVATEERING, but he ended up on the end of a noose. Captain Black Sam Bellamy and all his crew perished when their ship, the Whydah Galley, wrecked in a storm off the coast of Cape Cod. Calico Jack Rackham and his famous female crew members Anne Bonney and Mary Read were sentenced to death in Port Royal, Jamaica, but only Rackham swung. Bonney and Read “pleaded their bellies,” and, because they were both pregnant, escaped the hangman’s noose. The exploits of dozens of pirates of this period made for popular reading in the newspapers and pamphlets that were printed in Britain and the colonies. Moreover, the execution of a captured brigand brought out crowds in the thousands both to hear the Reverend Cotton Mather in Boston harangue the condemned pirates to repent as well as to witness the gruesome spectacle.

Pirate crews often were comprised of MARINERS who were unemployed, criminals, or otherwise dissatisfied with the oppressive social structure of colonial and imperial society. They commonly operated under a rough type of democracy, electing their captains, demoting leaders who failed to carry out the wishes of the crew, and dividing the spoils in a roughly egalitarian fashion. Pirates usually did not kill the crews of captured ships; instead, they offered them the opportunity to join in their illegal adventures. Indeed, the composition and actions of pirate crews provides an insightful lens into the world of common people and class antagonism in the early Atlantic world.

By 1726 the major “golden age” of pirates was over, and large-scale piracy moribund. Although occasional piracy in the Atlantic waters occurred after this date, never again were the pirates as organized and pervasive a presence as in the period from 1680 to 1730.

Further reading: Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the E-mpire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987);-, Villains of All

Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).

—Stephen C. O’Neill and E. Jerry Jessee