The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Popularity of Pirates

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 relied on sluggish and erratic transatlantic communications, which slowed the spread of the news that the Treaty of Madrid had brought a cessation to hostilities, to claim that he attacked under a commission that he believed still to be in force. The Spanish assumed that Morgan knew full well that the war had ended, and they in turn sought retribution against him. Although he spent time imprisoned in the Tower of London, Morgan was also elevated to the post of lieutenant governor of Jamaica, signaling the continued complicity of the government with the sort of depredations that brought him fame.¹¹ Like the boy who cried wolf, Spain’s tendency to cry piracy did not help it to persuade other governments that particular cases represented real outrages. When trading, settling, and even harvesting salt off uninhabited islands could be deemed piracy, the label lost some of its meaning. It behooves scholars to attend to specific circumstances when analyzing piracy accusations. Otherwise, ignoring complexity silently takes sides in debates about legitimacy and rights that are at the heart of accusations and acts.

The Ebb and Flow of Violence

Against a backdrop of numerous wars and many individual acts of reprisal, violence was not continuous but rather ebbed and flowed. The French first came into the region in the 1540s. The Dutch and English followed them some decades later, once wars in Europe propelled them into the Caribbean. Ships with nonviolent intentions—such as exploration, trade, or resource extraction—visited the West Indies. Some quietly went about their business without incident; others were attacked by the Spanish or turned to violence themselves. Certain periods of frequent maritime violence that did not coincide with war displayed a different logic. In the 1570s, the English launched numerous raids against the Spanish, and most of these aimed at retribution for the damage meted out to the captain of a Plymouth ship, John Hawkins, in his 1568 tour of the Spanish Caribbean. Making repeated visits to open a trade in slaves, Hawkins confronted Spanish forces on his third journey, suffering a dramatic defeat at their hands off Vera Cruz. The resulting upsurge in English raiding sought revenge and reprisal for Hawkins’s defeat.¹² Generally, war’s end brought an abatement, as was the case with the English after 1604, the Dutch to an extent during the truce years (1609–21), and the French around the turn of the seventeenth century. Spanish vigilance, although expensive to maintain, also prompted the occasional downturn. Prior to the mid-seventeenth century raiders invariably sailed from Europe and returned there. After that time, communities resident in the Caribbean became sufficiently large and complex to generate local populations of seafarers who could launch or participate in raids. Under those circumstances the later seventeenth century saw more violence and some of the most spectacular individual cases. Among the famous pirates dating from this era were those immortalized by Alexandre Exquemelin in his Bucaniers of America, such as Sir Henry Morgan and François l’Olonnais. Other well-known figures of the late seventeenth century include Basil Ringrose, William Dampier, and Bartholomew Sharpe. These late paroxysms of violence arose even as Spain dropped its effort to exclude foreigners, acceding to various foreign activity in a series of treaties: 1648 (Dutch), 1670 (English), and 1697 (French).

By the end of the seventeenth century, the Spanish Habsburg monarchy gave up its claims to exclusive rights to the Americas outside Brazil. This historic change occurred piecemeal, as Spain granted rights to a succession of other governments to have limited access to the Americas. The United Provinces of the Netherlands were the first to receive this boon. In the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which ended the long Dutch fight for independence, the Spanish acknowledge the right of the Dutch to sail to those places they had customarily had a presence. This concession recognized, among other outposts, the Dutch base on the island of Curaçao. Originally occupied to serve as a naval base during the war against Spain, Curaçao quickly emerged as an important center for contraband trade. The English were next to gain the right to sail Caribbean Seas, after the 1670 Treaty of Madrid gave up Spanish objections to the English colonies there, most notably Jamaica, which had been taken in 1655. That assault, launched under the authority of then Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, sparked a decade and a half of warfare that resulted in the treaty that finally acceded to English activities.¹³ France was last to win these concessions, doing so in the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697. By that time it held not only islands in the eastern Caribbean but Tortuga and a portion of the Spanish island of Santo Domingo. The treaty divided that island, giving France one end as the new colony of Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti). Centuries of pressure from rival European powers finally caused Spain to abandon its exclusive claims to the entire region. Although its implications only gradually became clear, this change also set the stage for a unified opposition to piracy across all these powers. Non-Spanish governments came to oppose piratical activities once raiders no longer targeted an intransigent Spanish enemy who blocked their presence but instead hampered their own ability to profit from peaceful trade. Spanish acceptance of rivals within its American space thus established the conditions for a coordinated campaign against unauthorized seaborne violence.

Sites of Interloping

For two centuries starting in 1500, Spain made grand claims and enacted strict policies but proved unable to enforce them. Counting just the areas they actively held and ruled, the extent of their American empire was truly remarkable. At the same time, it encompassed only a portion of the areas of North America, the Caribbean, and South America outside Portuguese Brazil. In addition to failing to hold all that it claimed, the Spanish Empire in the Americas embraced underpopulated, peripheral locations that saw very little trade or other interaction with the central Spanish settlements and economies. These peripheral regions inclined to open their ports to foreigners, especially if the occasional contraband trader brought much-needed items. Before the Spanish authorities caught up with John Hawkins to destroy most of his ships in the Battle of San Juan de Ulúa off Vera Cruz, he had successfully sold three cargoes of enslaved Africans to willing Spanish purchasers.¹⁴ While central ports and administrative centers followed the trade restrictions more closely, although not uniformly, truck with foreigners occurred more commonly on the periphery. The failure of full Spanish control opened the way to contraband trade. It also permitted interlopers to extract resources, including salt (essential for food preservation) from naturally occurring salt pans on certain islands and later logwood (a desirable product used in the making of furniture) harvested on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Such activities had to be pursued under arms, with the expectation of trouble from Spanish officials who were bent on enforcing the restrictions. As a result, violence always loomed in the background for non-Iberians who sailed American seas. Even when raiding was not the initial aim, frustrated traders might turn to it when they encountered intransigence or threats of violence. Like the eastern Mediterranean after Venice and the Ottomans no longer effectively divided it between them, cracks in the oversight of trade and other interactions left a space open for piracy.¹⁵ The far-reaching but only partially successful Spanish policy overreached, leaving openings for outside actors.

The Spanish policy of exclusion failed most spectacularly not in instances of piracy and other assaults, which must be seen as the price of doing business under the terms they sought to establish, but in the fact of non-Iberian territorial occupation. In the late sixteenth century, Spain’s rivals launched efforts at taking American lands. By the first decades of the seventeenth century, all the principal players had achieved a foothold in the Americas, of necessity on lands the Spanish claimed as their own. Prospective colonizers soon learned to stay clear of valuable Spanish-held territory. The fate of the short-lived French colony at St. Augustine, Florida, helped teach this lesson. Determined to protect the treasure fleet’s passage home, a Spanish force assailed and massacred the French colonists in 1565. Spain then established a settlement at St. Augustine in order to foil efforts to occupy the strategy chokepoint again.¹⁶ Sir Walter Raleigh sited his colony further north, still intent on using it as a base for depredations against the Spanish but hoping that placing it in modern-day North Carolina might avoid unwanted Spanish attention. Roanoke failed without ever coming under attack by Habsburg forces. In 1641, the Spanish authorities treated Providence Island residents somewhat more gingerly than those in Florida but removed them to the last person all the same. Patrolling the entirety of the Americas presented a too-daunting task, so settlements far to the north were left alone. The French settled Acadia and Quebec, the Dutch moved into the Hudson River region, the English took up Virginia, all out of the way of Spanish activity, but all on lands claimed by Spain. Interloping nations also settled areas on the eastern periphery of the Caribbean, with the French and English establishing outposts on the islands of the Lesser Antilles, which the Spanish had ignored, believing that it offered little of value and that it was well defended by Carib Indians in any event. Yet exclusion remained the policy for many decades after non-Spanish settlement became a reality.

If settlement flourished especially in the most remote locations, piracy proved most common on the immediate fringes of Spanish America. Charting the geographies of seaborne assault must remain incomplete, since incidents were recorded in widely scattered archives. Still, documented cases make clear that some areas attracted raiders far more than others. The Caribbean proved the premier site of piratical (and all other seaborne raiding) activity. As the region that included active local shipping networks, poorly defended coastal towns, and the coveted prize of the silver fleet, the Caribbean offered manifold opportunities for both wartime and unauthorized peacetime seizures. Eventually it came to have a resident population, referred to in English as buccaneers, who participated intermittently in assaults, both legal and otherwise.

On the other extreme, locations far from Spanish settlements, unattractive for their lack of high-value exports, might serve as bases, but they seldom served as targets for pirates or other plunderers. Places where other Europeans established colonies, being inherently less valuable, failed to attract Spanish attention initially and offered little to raiders subsequently. New England serves as a case in point. Its settler population grew quickly first through mass migration, then through its unusual demography of low death and high birth rates. Yet its exports were bulky items extracted from forests or agricultural produce. Without mineral wealth or exotic tropical crops, New England remained relatively untroubled by pirates. Early rover Dixie Bull did modest damage there, and during the eighteenth-century imperial wars, New England shipping, along with other British vessels, faced the threat of privateer or naval seizures.¹⁷ Yet pirates were more likely to visit the region to unload their ill-gotten gains, as William Bradford famously reported in his journal with regard to one sinful marauder, Thomas Cromwell.¹⁸ As Bradford hinted, the region could offer shelter to those seeking to sell illicitly obtained cargoes. Happy to host pirates who infused the local economy with much-needed wealth, Britain’s North American colonies proved appealing places to get rid of seized goods or enslaved Africans and to seek shelter among the settler population.¹⁹ Burgeoning northern settler colonies served as bases more than targets because the nature of their economies could absorb wealth and people but generated few high-value cargoes worth taking.

Other Atlantic regional geographies had a more complex relationship to piracy and plunder. The Newfoundland fisheries occasionally received attention from pirate ships that needed to pick up new crew members. Their vessels and their cargoes proved generally less attractive, although hungry raiders might also avail themselves of the available fish to restock their food supplies as well.²⁰ The West African coast offered attractive cargoes—first ivory or gold, which had ready markets in Europe, and, later, enslaved people who might be sold in the Azores and Canaries or in the colonies of the Americas. African leaders controlled the trade in slaves within Africa itself and at the ports where transactions with European buyers occurred. Raiders could make little headway on land without local arrangements already in place and were reduced to snatching individuals they could enslave, as did a Boston trader in one notorious incident in the