piracy

piracy. The oldest profession of the sea, piracy in British coastal waters by Saxon or north German seafarers may have become common by c. ad 400; with the Viking era, from c. ad 800, depredations by Norse adventurers became seasonal events. Essentially, however, piracy was pursued without the sanction of any higher authority unless, as was not infrequently the case, it had a measure of official connivance. This may partly explain why early sea laws in the west, which by implication place piracy ‘without the law’, do not seem to do so explicitly. In England, before the emergence of the Court of Admiralty in the 14th cent. the crown accorded substantial ‘self-regulation’ to the ports of the realm, but it did not do so lightly: in 1343 Edward III forthrightly condemned piracy in Dartmouth, for such abuse of foreign ships injured the royal preserve of relations with other states. An expanding sea-borne commerce, which in volume of shipping seems to have reached its first peak in England in about 1570, made piracy in waters which individual governments might pretend to control difficult if not impossible to counter. The quintessence of this situation lay in the Caribbean archipelagos of Spain's transatlantic empire, where a theoretical dominion was frequently challenged, and sometimes (Britain's treaty with Spain of 1670 is a case in point) with the active concurrence of Madrid. If there was a European precedent for the Spanish monopolistic approach it was in the Hanseatic League, with its self-protective commercial overlordship of northern waters in the 14th and 15th cents. Hanseatic power explains why English piracy flourished in the south-west, whence it reached into Biscay, the chief medieval source of salt and wine, rather than upon the coasts fronting the North Sea.

For all the dexterity and legalism of Elizabeth I's responses to Spanish allegations of piracy, it is inescapable that piracy there was; and that if government was a circumspect backer of Hawkins and Drake it was transparently a gainer from their daring. Elizabethan piracy was essentially a business venture, even if the force of a protestantism determined to challenge the papal award of the western hemisphere to Spain and the eastern to Portugal in 1494 should not be underrated. With the 17th cent. came piracy's great age in the West Indies. The Spanish need to purchase West African slaves from English and other slavers, Spain's extended communications which themselves invited rootless seafarers to prey upon cargoes of fabulous wealth, combined with the loose proprietorial hold on those islands Spain virtually conceded to Britain, such as New Providence in the Bahamas, or had lost to her through war, pre-eminently Jamaica. The heyday of Morgan, Teach (Blackbeard), Avery, Roberts, Kidd, though of hardly more than 50 years' duration, was symptomatic of Spain's equivocal self-defence in central America. Through her reforms at home, and a series of better-structured commercial treaties, institutional piracy did not recur in the later 18th cent., and had little place in South America's 19th-cent. independence movements.

The ‘internationalism’ in modern maritime law may stem from such 17th-cent. jurists as Grotius, but marine technology has so varied that law as to blur ‘old law and custom’. The submarine as a weapon of war in the early 20th cent., independent in operation as well as invisible, unable to afford assistance to torpedoed ships' companies, was plainly seen in some British circles as piracy re-emerging in a fresh and terrible guise. Only in 1917, with Germany's unrestricted U-boat war, did Britain cross the Rubicon and respond in kind.

David Denis Aldridge