The Golden Age of Piracy

The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Popularity of Pirates

David Head

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780820353272
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Shrouded by myth and hidden by Hollywood, the real pirates of the Caribbean come to life in this collection of essays edited by David Head. Twelve scholars of piracy show why pirates thrived in the New World seas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century empires, how pirates operated their plundering ventures, how governments battled piracy, and when and why piracy declined. The essays presented take the study of piracy, which can easily lapse into rousing, romanticized stories, to new heights of rigor and insight.

The Golden Age of Piracy also delves into the enduring status of pirates as pop culture icons. Audiences have devoured stories about cutthroats such as Blackbeard and Henry Morgan from the time that pirates sailed the sea. By looking at the ideas of gender and sexuality surrounding pirate stories, the fad for hunting pirate treasure, and the construction of pirate myths, the book's contributors tell a new story about the dangerous men, and a few dangerous women, who terrorized the high seas.

Contributors: Douglas R. Burgess, Guy Chet, John A. Coakley, Carolyn Eastman, Adam Jortner, Peter T. Leeson, Margarette Lincoln, Virginia W. Lunsford, Kevin P. McDonald, Carla Gardina Pestana, Matthew Taylor Raffety, and David Wilson.

SECTION 1

Pirates and Empire

Why Atlantic Piracy?

Carla Gardina Pestana

Early modern Atlantic seafaring appears deeply entangled in piracy, with the Caribbean the focal point of such activity. Famous characters fuel the popular association of the Atlantic with pirates, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir Henry Morgan to the notorious Edward Teach (Black-beard). Our perception of the West Indies as the site of continual, violent seaborne theft is off the mark. In fact, classic pirates—disassociated from the larger society, living by their own code, preying on any and all ships—existed only rarely. Pirates fitting this image became most common as a direct result of an official curb on a variety of activities, such as contraband trade and violence against rival imperial powers, as authorities successfully blocked their access to the coastal communities that had supported them. For much of the two centuries following the advent of Caribbean raiding in the 1520s, pirates worked for European rulers, represented commercial interests, and participated in communities on shore in ways that belie their image as “enemies of all mankind.” Only in the early eighteenth century would the tide turn against them in the Atlantic, forcing those who lived by seaborne raiding into the role of the desperate, disaffected pirate. That turn signaled not so much the apex of Atlantic piracy as the beginning of its end.

Piracy came to be associated with the Caribbean for historical reasons. The Atlantic, which we tend to equate with multipronged European expansion in the early modern period, was in fact legally defined as the exclusive purview of the two Iberian powers that would eventually emerge as modern Spain and Portugal. Clearly they did not succeed in keeping out all others, but their efforts to do so shaped not only piracy (and accusations of piracy) but also many other aspects of the Atlantic world. Resisting those exclusive claims made many seafarers into pirates—at least in the eyes of the Iberians they encountered. With the entrée of numerous rivals, the Americas turned into a complex, multinational space, as near constant warfare in Europe, particularly involving the powerful Spanish Habsburg family that ruled Spain from the 1520s, spilled over into the Americas. The great wealth extracted from Spain’s American possessions made the Flota de Indias, the fleet that carried Spanish silver to Cádiz, an attractive target in times of war—and at other times as well. The Atlantic thus quickly became and long remained a space of endemic conflict and contested claims, one in which the promise of riches attracted raiders. The combined effect of Spanish exclusionary claims, frequent wars, and vulnerable treasures created Atlantic piracy and sustained it for two centuries. The Caribbean was not simply a violent free-for-all particularly inviting to pirates but a more broadly contested space in which empires fought over access to land, trade, and wealth. Violence in many forms resulted, only some of it purely piratical.

A Sphere for Piracy

The Atlantic—or more correctly sectors of it—became a sphere for piracy because of the peculiarities of its integration into the European world. Entering a space they viewed as unclaimed, Spain and Portugal quickly divided what would turn out to be two additional continents and numerous islands. Within decades, they declared all other governments excluded from these newly discovered spaces.¹ In this, they aspired to act effectively as “a durable and hegemonic regime in a region with the power to define right and wrong.” Designating all who entered their space as pirates constituted a part of that effort.² Spain’s inability to make that exclusion a reality in the Caribbean, in concert with extraction and transportation of great wealth from the region, established the circumstances that made piracy a recurrent problem for two hundred years after the mid-sixteenth century. As in other parts of the world that were not fully controlled by a widely acknowledged authority, incomplete hegemony over the Atlantic opened spaces for illegal trade, poaching, and raids.³ Most fundamentally, interlopers entered the region because they denied the right of the Spanish or Portuguese to exclude them. Although the Protestant Reformation heightened tensions more generally and encouraged hostilities along religious lines, Caribbean animosities largely ignored religious divisions, with Catholic on Catholic violence nearly as common as Protestant versus Catholic clashes. From the Iberian perspective all interlopers were pirates, but many who were present resisted that definition and even attempted to act in keeping with their own sense of what were legitimate activities. The Spanish practices of deeming all who entered the Caribbean as pirates and treating the relatively harmless with the retribution that true piracy deserved heightened animosities and encouraged the descent into violence.

The European discovery of the Americas, an unprecedented event in world history, led to explorations of these vast areas undertaken by both Spain and Portugal. As new regions opened to European awareness, the two Iberian powers, with the support of the pope, divided ownership and rule of these areas between them—the Americas but also regions in Africa and Asia. In the Americas everything went to Spain save for Brazil, which was Portuguese, while Portugal claimed outposts in Africa and Asia. Both the Portuguese and the Spanish declared their new lands off limits to all other Europeans. Indeed the crown of Castile tried (unsuccessfully) to keep all Spaniards who were not Castilians out of the American kingdoms. The Spanish settlements in the Americas were never as purely Spanish (much less Castilian) as the policy dictated, especially on the Caribbean islands that were settled early and included non-Castilian Spaniards and Portuguese residents.⁴ Spain’s restrictive policies had a greater impact when it came to blocking trade and settlement. Rival European rulers challenged these rights to exclusive access, particularly those of the Spanish, which encompassed vast swaths of lands they had never visited, much less settled. No one rejected the assertion that discovery brought rights. Rather Spain’s rivals focused on the fact that Christopher Columbus only touched at specific places and that the explorers who came after him never visited every bit of the hemisphere. In this thinking, articulated during the first decades of the fifteenth century by French king Francis I, large expanses of the Americas remained open to others to discover, explore, and exploit.⁵ This fundamental disagreement, which would not be resolved until the end of the seventeenth century, shaped interactions in the region. Disagreements over access created conditions ripe for clandestine activity and acts of outright violence, as intruders entered the region, undeterred by Spanish claims and indeed bent on challenging them, and the Spanish authorities intermittently attempted to stymie their efforts.

With capacious but controversial Spanish claims dismissed as “contemptible arrogance” in some circles, the unprecedented mineral wealth extracted from Spanish America encouraged Spain’s foes to target its American riches.⁶ Using native and African labor, the Spanish extracted huge amounts of American silver and with it remade the world economy and cemented Spain’s place as the dominant European power. Bullion made the Spanish formidable and allowed them to dominate neighboring states. Rival Europeans feared that Spain aimed at “universal monarchy,” that is, control of all the world, and thought they might be able to achieve it given the massive amounts of silver they extracted from the Americas.⁷ The Spanish Habsburgs paid for the many wars necessary to extend and defend their extensive domain with American silver. This wealth represented a great temptation. Silver was attractive in and of itself for individuals and states that desired it for their own uses. Snatching it from Spain would undermine its might, which appealed to European states tired of bending to Spain’s will. The enemies of Spain fixated on the ships that transported silver to Europe, scouring the sea lanes of the Caribbean and the waters around the Canary Islands in hopes of taking a ship or the entire fleet. Only once in the long history of Spanish mineral extraction did anyone manage the latter feat: Dutch Admiral Piet Heyn in 1626. Other crews grabbed a treasure ship here and there, as did English naval forces dispatched by Oliver Cromwell in 1656.⁸ Generally, however, the dream of becoming rich by seizing a ship full of Spanish American silver went unfulfilled.

Throughout these centuries, the Spanish Habsburgs frequently fought wars with one or more European states, wars that increasingly had a Caribbean component. A near-continuous state of warfare meant Spain almost always had enemies ready, from the 1540s, to launch seaborne raids against its Atlantic possessions. Ships that sailed to the Americas in order to fight the Spanish came with authorization or at least under the cover of legitimate war hostilities. In the sixteenth century the ships entering the Caribbean Sea were generally privately owned vessels authorized by a monarch. Francis I sent explorers to North America and to Brazil, as well as corsairs to the Caribbean, the latter from 1542; his son and heir continued the harassment in the West Indies until a treaty was signed in 1559. In the following century, France fought Spain in Europe and the Americas, again using private ships for the latter actions, from 1635 to 1659; Franco-Spanish wars erupted subsequently for some part of each decade thereafter until century’s end. The Dutch revolted against Habsburg rule in 1568, fighting a long war to gain their independence, which they achieved in 1648. During that time, the Dutch West India Company pursued the war against Spain in the Americas, sending navies that took the treasure fleet in 1626 and seized part of Brazil in 1630 (then under Spanish rule with the union of the two crowns). England first turned against its longtime ally in the 1580s, when Elizabeth I supported the Dutch Revolt, and eventually went to war openly with Spain. Hence the English sent private vessels with royal authorization (and on at least one occasion royal financial backing) to the Caribbean from 1585 to 1604. During this period Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh gained their reputations as swashbuckling sea dogs. Conflicts pitting Spain against England in the seventeenth century brought private ships again into the region from 1625 to 1630. The English navy first made its appearance in West Indian waters in 1655, in a war that continued until the 1670 Treaty of Madrid, using an increasing number of private men-of-war. Periods of peace were sparse, and the regularity of combat shielded other acts of violence in the West Indies.

Outside of warfare, an age-old practice of raiding as a form of restitution also justified some acts of theft. Individual ships came to the West Indies bent on reprisal in response to previous seizures that their home government had judged illegal. Not all such vessels carried authorization (in the form of a letter of marque and reprisal) from a European authority; some came bent on acts of restitution or retribution without royal support. Seizing ships and cargoes for restitution or retribution predated European expansion into the Americas; before the rise of powerful monarchies, such actions were often conducted under the authority of a local port or a local lord rather than with the permission of the monarch.⁹ The early modern period witnessed an effort to rein in local initiative on such matters, but the process proved long and uneven. Reprisal seizures had once been considered entirely justified, and making injured parties see them in a different light demanded a drastic alteration in the thinking of merchants and port communities about how best to protect their interests. The Spanish policy of harshly punishing those caught in the Caribbean resulted in many instances deemed worthy of restitution, creating a vicious cycle. The Providence Island Company ships that raided Spanish vessels in the later 1630s carried authorization gained through a predictable chain of events. The company initially colonized the island off the coast of modern-day Nicaragua on the grounds that Spanish exclusivity was untenable. The Spanish responded to the English presence (which they deemed illegal) by attacking both company vessels and the settlement itself. The company then received authorization to take Spanish property to repay their losses. When Providence Island finally fell to the Spanish, the English lord high admiral commissioned the privateer William Jackson to exact retribution, which he did on his 1642–1643 tour through the region.¹⁰ Thus efforts to trade peaceably or establish a presence led almost inexorably to violence. As long as the Spanish excluded all other Europeans with force, and as long as other nations rejected that exclusion, confrontation remained inevitable.

The Spanish perspective on all these intruders—whether settlers, contraband traders, or robbers—was that they were pirates. Not only among the Spanish in the Americas but more broadly, piracy served as an ugly epithet, for to declare an act to be piracy delegitimized it. Whereas the actors might consider themselves contributing to a war effort or seeking restitution for an earlier wrong, targets of their attacks branded them pirates in order to place their actions firmly outside the law. Labels of piracy occurred far more frequently than actual acts of piracy. When scholars rely on the use of the word to identify a pirate, they privilege accusers’ perspectives. Acts of seaborne violence occurred without legitimate cause—simply for personal gain—but such instances were only one part of a highly complex phenomenon. Seaborne warfare, individual acts of reprisal, trade between willing parties that violated imperial policy—all these activities fell under the Spanish rubric for piracy. Even some acts widely held to be piracy fall in a shadowy area, allowing culprits to aver that they believed their actions to have been legitimate. Sir Henry Morgan’s devastating assault on Panama (1671) fell in that gray area, permitting him to sue those who printed accusations that he had engaged in piracy. Morgan re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1. Pirates and Empire
• Section 2. Suppression of Pirates
• Section 3. Modeling Piracy
• Section 4. Images of Pirates in Their Own Time and Beyond
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index