Piracy in the Caribbean
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Central America and the Caribbean [https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/reference_maps/pdf/central_america.pdf (detailed pdf map) |
]The great era of
piracy in the Caribbean (sometimes referred to as the
Spanish Main) began in the
1560s and died out only around the
1720s as the nation-states of Western Europe with colonies in the Americas began to exert more state control over the waterways of the
New World. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the
1640s until the
1680s.
—Pirate Captain
Bartholomew RobertsEarly causes
Piracy in the Caribbean came out of the interplay of larger international trends in the early modern period. The Caribbean had become a center of European trade and colonization after
Columbus' discovery of the New World for Europeans in 1492. In the 1493
Treaty of Tordesillas the non-European world had been divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese along a north-south line 270 leagues west of the
Cape Verde. This gave Spain control of the Americas, a position the Spaniards later reinforced with an equally unenforceable papal bull. On the Spanish Main, the key early settlements were
Cartagena in present-day
Colombia,
Porto Bello and
Panama City on the
Isthmus of Panama,
Santiago on the northern coast of
Cuba, and
Santo Domingo on the island of
Hispaniola. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish were mining staggering amounts of silver bullion from the mines of
Zacatecas in
New Spain (
Mexico) and
Potosà in
Peru (actually now located in what is
Bolivia). The huge Spanish silver shipments from the New World to the Old attracted pirates and
privateers, both in the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, all along the route from the Caribbean to
Seville.
To combat this constant danger, in the 1560's the Spanish adopted a convoy system. A
treasure fleet or
flota would sail annually from Seville (and later from
Cádiz) in Spain, carrying passengers, troops, and European manufactured goods to the Spanish colonies of the New World. This cargo, though profitable, was really just a form of ballast for the fleet as its true purpose was to transport the year's worth of silver to Europe. The first stage in the journey was the transport of all that silver from the mines in Peru and New Spain in a mule convoy called the Silver Train to a major Spanish port, usually on the Isthmus of Panama or from
Veracruz, Veracruz in Mexico. The
flota would meet up with the Silver Train, offload its cargo of manufactured goods to waiting colonial merchants and then transfer the precious cargo of gold and silver (in bullion or coin form) into its holds. This made the returning Spanish treasure fleet a tempting target, although pirates were more likely to shadow the fleet to attack stragglers than try and seize the well-guarded main vessels. The classic route for the treasure fleet in the Caribbean was through the
Lesser Antilles to the ports along the Spanish Main on the coast of
Central America and Mexico, then northwards into the
Yucatán Channel to catch the westerly winds back to Europe.
The
Dutch United Provinces of the Netherlands and
England, both defenders of
Protestantism, were defiantly opposed to
Catholic Spain (the greatest power of Christendom in the sixteenth century) by the 1560's, while the French government was seeking to expand its colonial holdings in the New World now that Spain had proven they could be extremely profitable. It was the French who had established the first non-Spanish settlement in the Caribbean when they had founded
Fort Caroline near what is now
Jacksonville,
Florida in
1564, although the settlement was soon wiped out by a Spanish attack from the larger colony of
Saint Augustine. Aided by their governments, English, French and Dutch traders and colonists utterly ignored the worthless line drawn by the Treaty of Tordesillas to invade Spanish colonial territory even in times of peace between their nations in Europe, which gave rise to the famed sixteenth century phrase: "No peace beyond the line."
The Spanish, despite being the wealthiest state in Christendom at the time, could not afford a sufficient military presence to control such a vast area of ocean or enforce their exclusionary, mercantilist trading laws which allowed only Spanish merchants to trade with the colonists of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. This led to constant smuggling to break the Spanish trading laws and new attempts at Caribbean colonization in peacetime by England, France and the Netherlands. Whenever a war was declared in Europe between the Great Powers the result was always widespread piracy and privateering throughout the Caribbean.
After the start of the
Anglo-Spanish war in 1585, and the resounding defeat of the
Spanish Armada in the
English Channel in 1588,
Habsburg Spain and the great Spanish Empire in the Americas began a long, slow slide in decay and eventual chaos, both militarily and economically. A focus on extracting mineral and agricultural wealth from the New World rather than building productive, self-sustaining settlements in its colonies; runaway inflation fueled in part by the massive shipments of silver and gold to Western Europe; endless rounds of ruinously expensive wars in Europe; an aristocracy that belittled commercial opportunities as beneath them and a Catholic Church that restricted intellectual inquiry and consumed too much of the nation's most talented manpower all led to Spain's ruinous decline from Great Power status. Spain's slow collapse would be extended across the entire seventeenth century, but by the dawn of the eighteenth century, Spain would be only a second-rate power in European affairs.
Meanwhile, in the Caribbean the arrival of European diseases with Columbus had decimated the local Indian populations: the native population of New Spain fell by 96% between 1500 and 1600. This loss of native population led Spain to increasingly rely on African slave labor to run Spanish America's colonies, plantations and mines and the trans-Atlantic slave trade offered new sources of profit for English, Dutch and French traders who wanted to violate the Spanish mercantilist lawsâ€"and did so, with impunity. But the relative emptiness of the Caribbean also made it an inviting place for England, France and the Netherlands to set up colonies of their own, especially as gold and silver became less important as commodities to be seized and were replaced by tobacco and sugar as cash crops that could make men very rich.
As Spain's military might in Europe weakened, the Spanish trading laws in the New World were violated with greater frequency by the merchants of other nations and the Spanish port on the island of
Trinidad off the northern coast of
South America, permanently settled only in 1592, became a major point of contact between all the nations with a presence in the Caribbean.
Between 1600 and 1620, expensive fortifications and garrisons at the major ports increased, but the treasure fleet silver shipments and the number of Spanish-owned merchant ships had declined. But the most astonishing thing was that the Spanish Empire in the Americas, as noted above, was literally an empty oneâ€"the diseases like
smallpox and
measles brought by the first Europeans to the New World had inflicted a century's worth of horrifying plagues on the native peoples. The entire Caribbean basin had been depopulated. In New Spain (Mexico), the Indian population had plunged from an estimated range of 10 million to 25 million people in 1500 before
Cortés' conquest to only 2 million by 1600. Food supplies had become short because of the sheer lack of people to work farms and the output in the Spanish silver mines had declined because of the lack of Indian workers. The number of European-born Spaniards in the New World or Spaniards of pure blood who had been born in New Spain, known as
peninsulares and
creoles, respectively, in the Spanish race-based caste system, totaled no more than 100,000 people in 1600. Even worse, almost no Spaniards in the New World served as the productive members of society who grew crops or manufactured goodsâ€"they all expected to enjoy lives of aristocratic ease in their haciendas as the masters of great plantations growing food,tobacco or sugar, with African or Indian slaves to serve them and do all of the heavy labor. This social structure held true throughout the Caribbean and along the coasts of the Spanish Main.
At the same time, England and France were economically expanding, and were powers on the rise in Europe. In this period, both had kingsâ€"
James I in England and
Henry IV of Franceâ€"who sought more peaceful relations with Habsburg Spain. Although this reduced the opportunities for both piracy and privateering, neither monarch discouraged his nation from seeking to plant colonies in the New World. The reputed riches, pleasant climate and the general emptiness of the Americas all beckoned and a miscellaneous assortment of Frenchmen and Englishmen started new colonial ventures during this time, both in North America, which lay basically empty of European settlement, and in the Caribbean, where Spain remained the dominant power.
As for the Dutch Netherlands, after decades of rebellion against Spain fueled by both Dutch nationalism and their staunch Protestantism, independence had been gained in all but name (and that too would eventually come with the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648). The United Provinces were proving to be nothing short of an economic miracle. With new, innovative ship designs like the
fluyt (a cargo vessel able to be operated with a small crew and enter relatively inaccessible ports), new capitalist economic arrangements like the joint-stock company and the reprieve of the
Twelve Years' Truce with the Spanish (1609-1621), Dutch commercial interests were expanding explosively across the globe, in the New World and East Asia. However, in the early seventeenth century, the most powerful Dutch companies, like the
Dutch East India Company, were most interested in developing operations in the
East Indies (
Indonesia) and
Japan, and left the West Indies to smaller, more independent Dutch operators.
In the early seventeenth century, the cities of Cartagena,
Havana, Panama City, Santo Domingo and Santiago were the most important settlements in the West Indies. Each was well-populated, wealthy, well-fortified by Spanish defenders, heavily garrisoned with Spanish troops and quite intolerant of foreign traders because of the strict enforcement of the Spanish mercantilist laws. In these cities,
tobacco and European manufactured goods could command premium prices.
By 1600, Porto Bello had replaced
Nombre de Dios (where Sir
Francis Drake had first struck at the Spanish) as the Isthmus of Panama's Caribbean port for the Spanish Silver Train and the annual treasure fleet. Veracruz in Mexico continued to serve the vast inland colonial areas of New Spain as the primary entry and exit port for European goods and Mexican products. Both cities were small and still economically unhealthy in this period, which limited both their growth and their economic success.
By the seventeenth century, the majority of the Spanish Main and inland Central America had become economically viable. The smaller towns of the Main grew tobacco and also welcomed foreign smugglers who avoided the Spanish mercantilist laws. The hinterlands of the island of Hispaniola was another area where tobacco smugglers in particular were welcome.
The island of Trinidad was in its heyday as a wide-open smugglers port open to ships and seamen of every nation on the Main in this time. Local Caribbean smugglers sold their tobacco for decent prices and then bought European manufactured goods from the trans-Atlantic traders in large quantities to be dispersed through the West Indies and the Spanish Main. The Spanish governor of Trinidad, who lacked both harbor fortifications and possessed only a laughably small garrison of Spanish troops, could do little but take lucrative bribes from the English, French and Dutch smugglers and look the other wayâ€"or risk being overthrown and replaced by his own people with a more pliable administrator.
The English in this period had established early colonies on
Barbados (in 1627) and
Grenada in the West Indies, although these small settlements still faced considerable dangers from the local cannibalistic
Carib Indians. Both islands needed regular imports of food from England or the rest of the Caribbean to survive. No large tobacco plantations or even truly organized defenses had been established by the English for these settlements and the settlement on Grenada eventually failed.
After the destruction of Fort Caroline by the Spanish, the French attempted no further colonization attempts in the Caribbean for several decades as France was convulsed by its own Catholic-Protestant divide during the late sixteenth century
Wars of Religion. However, old French privateering anchorages with small "tent camp" towns could be found during the early seventeenth century in the Bahamas. There was no agriculture at these small settlements, though a ship at sea for a long time might have been able to take on some much needed fresh water and food, though at a very dear price.
In the first two decades of the seventeenth century, Dutch fluyts were commonly seen in Caribbean waters, but no true Dutch-owned ports (called "factories") yet existed. The Dutch spent most of their time trading in smuggled goods with the smaller Spanish colonies. Trinidad was the unofficial home port for the Dutch in the New World in this period.
The period 1620-1640 in the Caribbean was defined by the outbreak of the terribly destructive
Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618-1648) that represented both the culmination of the Protestant-Catholic conflict and the final showdown between Habsburg Spain and
Bourbon France. The war was mostly fought in
Germany, where one-third to one-half of the population would eventually be lost to the strains of the conflict, but it had some effect in the New World as well. The Spanish presence in the Caribbean began to decline at a faster rate, becoming more dependent on African slave labor. The Spanish military presence also declined as Madrid shifted more of its resources to the Old World in the Habsburgs' knock-down, drag-out fight with almost every Protestant state in Europe. This accelerated the decay of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. The towns and cities of the Spanish Main and the Spanish West Indies became financially weaker and of course were garrisoned with a much smaller number of troops. The Spanish Empire's economy remained stagnant and the Spanish plantations, ranches and mines were totally dependent upon slave labor imported from
West Africa. With Spain no longer able to maintain its control effectively over the Caribbean, the other Western European states finally began to move in and set up permanent settlements of their own, ending the Spanish monopoly over the New World.
Even as the Dutch Netherlands were forced to renew their struggle against Spain for independence as part of the Thirty Years' War (the entire rebellion was called the
Eighty Years' War in Holland), Holland had become the world's leader in mercantile shipping and commercial capitalism and Dutch companies had finally turned their attention to the West Indies. The renewed war with Spain offered many opportunities for the successful Dutch joint-stock companies to finance military expeditions against the Spanish Empire. The old English and French privateering anchorages from the sixteenth century in the Caribbean now swarmed with Dutch warships.In England, a new round of colonial ventures in the New World was fueled by declining economic opportunities at home and growing religious intolerance for more radical Protestants (like the
Puritans) who rejected the compromise Protestant theology of the established
Church of England. After the demise of the
Saint Lucia and Grenada colonies soon after their establishment, and the near-death of the settlement of
Jamestown in
Virginia, new and stronger colonies were established by the English in this period, at
Plymouth,
Boston,
Barbados, the West Indian islands of
Saint Kitts and
Nevis and
Providence Island. These colonies would all persevere to become centers of English civilization in the New World.
For France, now ruled by the Bourbon King
Louis XIII and his able minister
Cardinal Richelieu, religious civil war had been reignited between French Catholics and Protestants (called
Huguenots). Throughout the 1620's, French Huguenots fled France and founded colonies in the New World much like their English counterparts. Then, in 1636, to decrease the power of the Habsburg dynasty who ruled Spain and the
Holy Roman Empire on France's eastern border, France entered the cataclysm in Germanyâ€"on the Protestants' side.
In this period, the cities of Cartagena, Havana and Panama City remained the capital cities of the West Indies. Santiago in Cuba and Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, older settlements, had declined into a secondary position of importance, though each was still quite rich by the standards of the English colonies in North America at the time. Many of the cities on the Spanish Main in the period 1620-1640 were economically viable but few were yet prosperous. Tobacco was a cheap export crop at some towns. The more backward towns in the hinterlands of Jamaica and Hispaniola were primarily places for ships to take on food and fresh water at this time. Trinidad remained a popular smuggling port where European manufactured goods were plentiful and fairly cheap, while good prices were paid for any tobacco. However, Trinidad was increasingly being overshadowed at this time by the new English colonies to the north.Among these, Barbados, the first truly successful English colony in the West Indies, was growing fast. Increasingly, English ships used it as their home port in the Caribbean. As at Trinidad, merchants serving the trans-Atlantic trade always paid good money for tobacco. The colonies on Saint Kitts and Nevis, founded in 1623, were newer and smaller at this time. Another new English venture on Providence Island off the
Mosquito Coast of
Nicaragua, deep in the heart of the Spanish Empire, had become the premier base for English privateers and other pirates raiding the Spanish Main.
On the shared island of Saint Christophe ("Saint Kitts" to the English) the French had the upper hand. This French colony was mostly Catholic, while the unofficial but growing French presence in northeast Hispaniola was largely made up of French Protestants who had settled there without Spain's permission. These enterprising Huguenots had already claimed the island of
Tortuga off the northwest coast of Hispaniola and had established the settlement of
Petit Goâve.
Dutch colonies in the Caribbean at this time remained few and far-between. Along with the traditional privateering anchorages in the
Bahamas and
Florida, the Dutch had begun a "factory" (commercial town) on
Curaçao in 1634, an island positioned right in the center of the Spanish Main off the northern coast of
Venezuela.
The period of 1640-1660 in the Caribbean was again governed by the events in far-off Europe. For the Dutch Netherlands, France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, the Thirty Years War being fought in Germany, the last great religious war in Europe, had degenerated into an outbreak of famine, plague and starvation across the ruins of Germany. England, having wisely avoided any entanglement in the European mainland's wars, had come to the brink of its own ruinous civil war that resulted in the short but brutal Puritan military dictatorship (1649-1660) of the Lord Protector
Oliver Cromwell and his
Roundhead armies. Of all the European Great Powers, Spain was in the worst shape as the Thirty Years' War concluded in 1648. Economic conditions had become so poor for the Spanish that Spain's provinces rose up in rebellion against the bankrupt and ineffective Habsburg government of King
Philip IV.
But disasters in the Old World bred new opportunities in the New. The Spanish Empire's colonies were at their military and economic nadir in this period. Freebooters and privateers, experienced after decades of European warfare, pillaged and plundered the all-but-helpless Spanish settlements with ease and with little interference from the European governments back home. The non-Spanish colonies were growing and expanding across the Caribbean, fueled by boatloads of refugees from the chaos in Europe. While most of these new immigrants settled into the West Indies' expanding plantation-based economy, others took to the life of the buccaneer. Meanwhile, the craft Dutch, at last truly independent of Spain after the conclusion of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ended their own Eighty Years' War (1568-1648) with the Habsburgs, made a fortune carrying the European trade goods needed by these new colonies. Peaceful trading was not as profitable as privateering, but it was a far safer business.
The richest Spanish cities of this time remained the great capitals of the region: Panama City, Cartagena, Havana and Santiago. These settlements continued to have wealthy economies and high prices for goods.
San Juan on
Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo on Hispaniola were prospering once more, but remained populated by old, aristocratic Spanish Creole families with expensive tastes. Both cities were well-fortified and garrisoned by their Spanish masters. But overall, all of the other Spanish cities in the Caribbean were barely breaking even. Spanish towns in the region's hinterlands were in the verge of disappearing completely under the tidal wave of immigration from England, France and Holland.
Of the new colonies, Barbados had become the unofficial capital of the English West Indies. The island was a trader's dream in this period. European goods were freely available, the island's sugar cash crop sold for premium prices and the local merchants were wealthy and well-stocked. The English colonies at Saint Kitts and Nevis were economically strong and now well-populated as the demand for sugar in Europe increasingly drove their plantation-based economies. The English had also expanded to several new islands, including
Antigua (1632),
Montserrat (1632),
Bermuda (1612), and
Eleuthera in the
Bahamas (1648), though these settlements at the time were small colonies with low populations, little economic demand and only small towns.
For the French, major colonies were founded on the sugar-growing islands of
Guadeloupe (1634) and
Martinique (1635) in the
Lesser Antilles. However, the heart of French activity in the Caribbean at this time remained
Tortuga, a well-fortified haven for privateers, buccaneers and outright pirates. The French colonies on Hispaniola were developing slowly at the settlement of
Petit Goâve. French privateers still used the anchorages in the
Florida Keys to plunder the Spaniards' shipping in the Florida Channel, as well as to raid the northern coast of Cuba.
For the Dutch of this time,
Curaçao was the equivalent of the English Barbados. This large, rich, well-defended free port offered good prices for sugar and sold large quantities of European goods in return. A second international Dutch-controlled free port had developed on the island of
Saint Eustatius (1636), while sleepy
Saint Martin had become the peaceful home of Dutch sugar planters and their African slave labor.
The era between 1660 and 1680 is often considered the first half of the "Golden Age of Piracy" in the Caribbean. The Spanish Empire in the New World continued its rapid military decline when the senile King Philip IV was succeeded by the equally inept regency of King
Charles II, who in 1665 became the last Habsburg king of Spain at the age of four. While Spanish America in the late seventeenth century was left without much military protection as Spain entered its terminal decline, this also meant that the Spanish Crown's bureaucratic, mercantilist interference with its colonial empire's economy also became less pronounced. This lack of interference, combined with a sudden surge in output from the silver mines because of the increased availability of slave labor, began a resurgence in the economy of Spanish America.
England, France and the Dutch Netherlands had all become colonial powerhouses in their own right by 1660. Worried by Holland's commercial success, England launched a trade war with the Dutch when Parliament passed the first of its own mercantilist
Navigation Acts (1651) and the Staple Act (1663) that required that English colonial goods be carried only in English ships and legislated limits on trade between the English colonies and foreigners that were aimed at ruining the Dutch merchants who depended on free trade. This trade war would lead to three outright
Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652-1654), (1665-1667), (1672-1674) over the course of the next twenty-five years. Meanwhile, King
Louis XIV of France (r. 1642-1715) had finally assumed his majority with the death of his regent mother Queen
Anne of Austria's chief minister,
Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661. The "Sun King's" aggressive foreign policy was aimed at expanding France's eastern border in Europe and led to constant warfare against shifting alliances that included England, Holland, the varied German states of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. In short, Europe had been consumed by nearly constant dynastic intrigue and warfare, where enemies and allies changed places as often as the partners at one of Louis XIV's court dances in his palace at
Versailles.
In the Caribbean, this political environment led colonial governors to confront new threats from every direction. The sugar island of Saint Eustatius changed ownership ten times between 1664 and 1674 as the English and Dutch dueled for supremacy. Consumed with war in Europe, the mother countries provided almost no further military or naval forces to their colonies, so the colonial governors of the Caribbean asked buccaneers, privateers and even outright pirates to guard their colonies or carry the fight to the enemy of the moment. Surprisingly (or not), these boisterous, profit-motivated often proved difficult to control.
By the late seventeenth century,
Panama,
Havana and Cartagena endured as the three greatest Spanish cities, rich, well-fortified and well-garrisoned. Still sizable but of declining importance were Santiago, Santo Domingo and San Juan. The remaining Spanish towns had begun to prosper once more as the Spanish Empire revived, but were so weak militarily because of Spain's problems that they were all easy prey for pirates and privateers.
Barbados remained the greatest of the English colonies in the Caribbean in this era, with
Saint Kitts close behind. Captured from Spain in 1655,
Jamaica had been taken over by England and its chief settlement of
Port Royal had become a new English buccaneer haven in the midst of the Spanish Empire and was only a short voyage downwind from the French colonies on Hispaniola. In the Lesser Antilles,
Guadeloupe and
Martinique remained the main centers of French power in the Caribbean, as well as among the richest French possession because of their profitable sugar plantations. The French also maintained privateering strongholds around western
Hispaniola,
Tortuga,
Port-de-Paix,
Petit Goâve and
Léogane.
For the Dutch,
Curaçao remained their chief colony in the West Indies and one of the greatest free ports in the seventeenth century world. Saint Eustatius by this time had almost surpassed it, but the constant back-and-forth warfare between the Dutch and the English for possession of it had damaged the island's economy.
The period 1680-1720 represented the sunset of the Golden Age of the pirate and buccaneer. By this time, Europe remained as riven by warfare and carnage as it had ever been as France and England (after 1707, Great Britain) maneuvered for supremacy. But the depredations of the pirates and buccaneers in the Americas in the previous twenty years had taught the rulers and military minds of Europe that those who fought for profit rather than for King and Country could often ruin the local economy of the region they plundered, in this case the Caribbean. As the same time, the constant warfare had led the Great Powers to develop larger standing armies and bigger navies to meet the demands of global colonial warfare and so they had enough troops and fleets at their disposal to begin better protecting important colonies in the West Indies and in the Americas. This spelled the doom of privateering and the easy life of the buccaneer. Though Spain remained a weak power, pirates in large numbers generally disappeared, chased from the seas by a new English Royal Navy squadron based at
Port Royal,
Jamaica and a smaller group of Spanish privateers sailing from the Spanish Main known as the Costa Garda. With regular military forces now on-station in the West Indies, letters of marque were harder and harder to obtain. Freebooters of all nationalities flocked to the French flag in 1684 when France offered letters of marque to fight the English once more.
Economically, the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century was a time of growing wealth and trade for all the nations of the Caribbean. Although some piracy would always remain until the mid-eighteenth century, the path to wealth in the future lay through peaceful trade, the growing of sugar and smuggling to avoid the British Navigation Acts.By the dawn of the eighteenth century,
Havana,
Panama City, Cartagena and Santiago were still important cities in Spanish America, despite the raids and misfortunes of the seventeenth century.
Caracas in
Venezuela had risen to a new prominence as the main port serving the interior of
South America, while Santo Domingo and San Juan had slipped to the second rank, isolated among the growing wealth of the French and English settlements in the area.
Port Royal,
Barbados and
Saint Kitts were the great English ports of the early eighteenth century in the West Indies, while the other English Caribbean cities remained economically healthy trading posts. The
Bahamas had become the new colonial frontier for the English.
Nassau had become one of the last pirate havens. A small English colony had even sprung up in former Spanish territory at
Belize in
Honduras that had been founded by an English pirate in 1638.
The French colonial empire had not grown substantially by the start of the eighteenth century. The sugar islands of
Guadaloupe and
Martinique remained the twin economic capitals, and were now equal in economic strength to the largest of the English ports.
Tortuga had begun to decline in importance, but the Hispaniolan towns of
Port-de-Paix,
Petit Goâve and
Léogane were all thriving and becoming magnets for the African slave trade as French sugar plantation spread across the western coast of Hispaniola.
As with the French colonies, the shape of the Dutch possessions in the Caribbean had remained constantâ€"
Curaçao remained the greatest free port in the West Indies while
Saint Eustatius was recovering from the destruction of the
Anglo-Dutch Wars and trying to rebuild trade with the nearby English.
Saint Martin, the northernmost Dutch possession, simply expanded its profitable sugar plantation economy, though since 1648, the Dutch had agreed to divide the island in half with the French.
After 1720, piracy in the classic sense became extremely rare in the Caribbean as European military and naval forces, especially those of the British
Royal Navy, just became too widespread and active for any pirate to pursue an effective career for long. Pirates who were caught were usually hanged as soon as the British returned to port. Piracy saw a brief resurgence between the end of the
War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 and around 1720, as many unemployed seafarers took to piracy as a way to make ends meet when a surplus of sailors after the war led to a decline in wages and working conditions. At the same time, one of the terms of the
Treaty of Utrecht that ended the war gave to Great Britain a thirty-year asiento, or contract, to furnish African slaves to the Spanish colonies, providing British traders and smugglers potential inroads into the traditionally closed Spanish markets in America and leading to an economic revival for the whole region. This revived Caribbean trade provided rich new pickings for a wave of piracy that lasted only until the Royal Navy was enlarged to deal with the threat.
Privateering on the other hand, would remain a tool of European states, and even of the newborn United States, well into the nineteenth century. But again, letters of marque were given out much more sparingly by governments and were terminated as soon as conflicts ended. The idea of "no peace beyond the Line" was a relic that had no meaning by the more settled late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Blackbeard
Perhaps the most famed pirate from this period was known as "Blackbeard" but had been born Edward Drummond (also sometimes named as Edward Teach) in England in 1680 and operated off the east coast of North America in the period 1714-1718. Noted as much for his outlandish appearance as for his piratical success, in combat Blackbeard placed burning slow-match (a type of slow-burning fuse used to set off cannon) under his hat: with his face wreathed in fire and smoke, his victims claimed he resembled a fiendish apparition from Hell.
Blackbeard met his end at the hands of an English fleet specifically sent out to capture him. After an extremely bloody boarding action, the English commanding officer of the fleet, Lieutenant Robert Maynard, examined Blackbeard's body and discovered that it had taken five bullet wounds and twenty slashes with a cutlass before the pirate had finally died.
Henry Morgan
Henry Morgan was one of the most prolific English privateers of the seventeenth century. A bold, ruthless and daring man, Morgan fought England's enemies for thirty yearsâ€"and became a very wealthy man in the course of his adventures. Morgan's most famous exploit came in late 1680 when he led 1700 buccaneers up the pestilential
Charges River and then through the Central American jungle to attack and capture the "impregnable" city of
Panama. The city's capture was not much of a financial coup, as most of its wealth had been removed before the English attack and the remainder had been destroyed by a fire that swept the city even as Morgan had captured it. However, the sack of Panama City was a deep blow to Spanish power and pride in the Caribbean and Morgan became the hero of the hour in England (and also lent his name to a popular brand of present-day rum). At the height of his career, Morgan had been made a titled nobleman by the English Crown and lived on an enormous sugar plantation in
Jamaica. Morgan died in his bed, surrounded by his familyâ€"something rarely achieved by pirates in his day or any other.
William Kidd
In 1695 Captain William Kidd commanded an English privateering venture in the
Red Sea where he was to attack French shipping operating in the eastern Mediterranean during the War of the
League of Augsburg (1688-1697). Unfortunately, most of the French shipping had already been dispatched by other privateers before Kidd had arrived. To keep his prize-happy crew from mutinying and probably killing him, Kidd began attacking other, less legitimate targets.
On January 30, 1698, Kidd captured the Quedah Merchant. Owned by Armenians and flying the French flag when it was taken, the Merchant was one of the greatest prizes ever taken at sea, worth about 50,000 English pounds sterling. To his horror, Kidd discovered that the vessel was actually commanded by an English captain and crew who had been flying under false French colors to confuse potential pirates, which made his taking of the vessel an act of piracy against England. Kidd tried to return the merchant vessel to its owners, but his crew refused to give up their great prize. Upon his return to the English colonies at New York, Kidd (who is the only known real pirate to have actually buried his treasure, in this case on
Long Island) tried to use his own new wealth to purchase a pardon for his piracy, but the English had taken a no-tolerance policy towards piracy. Kidd was taken prisoner and returned to England in chains, where he was imprisoned for a year and then duly hanged at the order of the Crown.
In the Caribbean the use of
privateers was especially popular. The cost of maintaining a fleet to defend the colonies was beyond national governments of the 16th and 17th centuries. Private vessels would be commissioned into a 'navy' with a
letter of marque, paid with a substantial share of whatever they could capture from enemy ships and settlements, the rest going to the crown. These ships would operate independently or as a fleet and if successful the rewards could be great — when
Francis Drake captured the Spanish
Silver Train at
Nombre de Dios (Panama's Caribbean port at the time) in
1573 his crews were rich for life. This was repeated by
Piet Hein in
1628, who made a profit of 12 million
guilders for the
Dutch West India Company. This substantial profit made privateering something of a regular line of business; wealthy businessmen or nobles would be quite willing to finance this legitimized piracy in return for a share. The sale of captured goods was a boost to colonial economies as well.
Specific to the Caribbean were pirates termed
buccaneers. Roughly speaking they arrived in the 1630s and remained until the effective end of piracy in the
1730s. The original buccaneers were escapees from the colonies; forced to survive with little support, they had to be skilled at boat construction, sailing, and hunting. The word "buccaneer" is actually from the French
boucaner, meaning "to smoke meat", from the hunters of wild oxen curing meat over an open fire. They transferred the skills which kept them alive into piracy. They operated with the partial support of the non-Spanish colonies and until the
1700s their activities were legal, or partially legal and there were irregular amnesties from all nations.
Traditionally buccaneers had a number of peculiarities. Their crews operated as a
democracy: the captain was elected by the crew and they could vote to replace him. The captain had to be a leader and a fighter—in combat he was expected to be fighting with his men, not directing operations from a distance.
Spoils were evenly divided into shares; when the officers had a greater number of shares, it was because they took greater risks or had special skills. Often the crews would sail without wages—"on account"—and the spoils would be built up over a course of months before being divided. There was a strong
esprit de corps among pirates. This allowed them to win sea battles: they typically outmanned trade vessels by a large ratio. There was also for some time a social insurance system, guaranteeing money or gold for battle wounds at a worked-out scale.
One undemocratic aspect of the buccaneers was that sometimes they would force specialists like carpenters to sail with them for some time, though they were released when no longer needed (if they had not volunteered to join by that time). Note also that a typical poor man had few other promising career choices at the time apart from joining the pirates. The pirates were egalitarian and liberated slaves when taking over
slave ships. Their island communities however did not sustain this model of society in the long run.
In combat they were considered ferocious and were reputed to be experts with
flintlock weapons (invented in
1615), but these were so unreliable that they were not in widespread military use before the
1670s.
The decline of piracy in the Caribbean paralleled the decline of
mercenaries and the rise of national armies in Europe. Following the end of the
Thirty Years' War national power expanded. Armies were codified and brought under Royal control and privateering was largely ended; the navies were expanded and their mission was stretched to cover combating piracy. The elimination of piracy from European waters expanded to the Caribbean in the 1700s, West Africa and North America by the 1710s and by the 1720s even the Indian Ocean was a difficult location for pirates. The famous pirates of the early 18th century were a completely illegal remnant of a golden buccaneering age, and they could expect no more than eventual capture. Contrast this with the earlier example of
Henry Morgan, who for his privateering efforts was knighted and made governor of
Jamaica.
John Boysie Singh, usually known as "the Rajah," "Boysie" or "
Boysie Singh," was born on 5th April, 1908 in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, Trinidad, and finally hanged in Port of Spain in 1957 for the murder of his niece, Thelma Hayes.
He had a long and successful career as a gangster and gambler before turning to piracy and murder. For almost ten years, from 1947 until 1956 he and his gang terrorized the waters between Trinidad and Venezuela. They were responsible for the deaths of many fishermen — the number has sometimes been put as high as 400. Their technique was generally to board fishing boats, murder their crew, and steal the engine which they would later sell in nearby Venezuela after sinking the boat.
Boysie was well-known to everyone in
Trinidad and Tobago. He had successfully beaten two charges of murder before he was finally executed after losing his third case. He was held in awe and dread by most of the population and was frequently seen strolling grandly about
Port of Spain in the early 1950s wearing bright, stylish clothes. Mothers and nannies would warn their charges: "Behave yourself, man, or Boysie goyn getchu, oui!"
*
Jolly Roger, the traditional pirate flag
Films
* Many silent films of pirates, especially starring
Douglas Fairbanks, such as
The Black Pirate*
Captain Blood (1935)
*
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl*
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest*
Muppet Treasure IslandBooks
*
Treasure Island by
Robert Louis Stevenson - a novel with a huge influence on pirates in the public imagination, particularly in the character of the canonical pirate,
Long John Silver*
Captain Blood*
The Black Corsair (
Il Corsaro Nero, 1898) by
Emilio Salgari and its 4 sequels.
Computer games
*
Monkey Island *
Sid Meier's Pirates!*
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates*
Tradewinds*
Port Royal (for Symbian Series60 mobile phones)*
Tropico 2: Pirate CoveMusic
* The soundtrack to
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and it sequel
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest* "A Pirate Looks At Forty" By
Jimmy Buffet* Derek Bickerton.
The Murders of Boysie Singh: Robber, Arsonist, Pirate, Mass-Murderer, Vice and Gambling King of Trinidad. Arthur Barker Limited, London. (1962).
*
The Golden Age of Piracy, and its origins in class struggle - on peopleshistory.co.uk
*
Jamaica Guide - History - Pirates and English Settlement - discusses piracy on Jamaica including Henry Morgan.
