Piracy

Piracy is highway robbery at sea, and pirates are thieves afloat. Since ancient times pirates have thrived as parasites on legitimate maritime commerce. After 1450, however, the volume and value of certain types of seaborne trade grew dramatically. Criminal gangs of seafaring men, along with a few women, soon seized upon this new bounty. Some were spurred by vengeance, but most it seems by the hope of gain. Some sea raiders preferred to steal from religious or political enemies, occasionally as licensed "corsairs," or "privateers," in wartime. Licensed reprisal was an ancient custom of the sea. In other cases coastal fishing folk revived or developed new piratical tendencies as opportunity arose. All three forms of piracy—freelance criminal, politico-religious, and culturally endemic—have persisted to the present day, particularly where states are weak and commercial traffic is heavy. Geographically, piracy has flourished mostly near narrow straits, isolated archipelagos, and rugged coasts. Pirates have always needed land bases and markets for stolen goods.

The great prizes of the early modern period, which included vessels as diverse as carracks, caravels, dhows, galleons, junks, frigates, and giant outrigger canoes, carried gold, silver, gemstones, silk, fine porcelain, sugar, spices, and slaves. Freightage costs were so high at first that only compact valuables got shipped long-distance, whether in eastern or western seas. With such concentrations of liquid and attractive plunder at stake and with such weak maritime law enforcement the worldwide norm, true pirates did not discriminate. Their victims included Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, Mughal, Venetian, Javanese, Dutch, Gujarati, French, Ottoman, Danish, and many other shippers. Indeed, the temptations were such that sailors and merchants of these and other ethnicities and nationalities frequently turned pirate or renegade. In lieu of international accord or a concerted naval campaign, piracy was nearly unpunishable.

For much of the early modern period, Iberian Catholics were the principal targets of piracy in the Americas and East Atlantic. The considerable mineral wealth of the Indies proved irresistible, and even Columbus was victimized by French corsairs. Meanwhile, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian pirates of varying regional origins preyed upon numerous trading states and merchant communities in the Mediterranean. Most famous among these were the Barbary corsairs, whose ransoming and extortion rackets persisted into the early nineteenth century. Farther east, the vibrant commercial economy of Venice appears to have been undone in large part due to piracy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, thanks to the Uskoks of Senj and other entrenched parasites. On the other hand, Venetian, Spanish, Chinese, Mughal, French, English, Portuguese, and Ottoman naval officials all regarded "culturally endemic" pirates a useful paramilitary scourge on occasion. Weak states needed all hands.

Chinese and Southeast-Asian shipping proved highly vulnerable to Japanese pirates, or wako, who raided both commercial fleets and significant land targets in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Ming state's response was mostly to relax monopoly trade strictures in the later sixteenth century, with aggressive sea action appearing only after the Manchu succession. By the mid-seventeenth century, Taiwan was regarded as strategically critical to both pirates and their enemies. By this time Madagascar was emerging as an international Indian Ocean pirate base, frequented by such famous characters as William Kidd. Indigenous pirates of varying faiths and ethnic affiliations also flourished in the heavily traversed Arabian Sea and neighboring waters, particularly the straits on either side of the Arabian Peninsula, some until the early nineteenth century. The main targets were first Muslim pilgrims, and later Hindu and other non-Muslim merchants.

In the Americas, the Spanish had it worst. This was to be expected for two reasons: 1) the enormous extent of thinly patrolled littorals and poorly defended shipping lanes claimed by Spain; and 2) the frequent movement of bullion in Spanish bottoms. As a result, piracy and privateering cycles recurred in both Atlantic and Pacific Spanish America from 1500 to the 1820s. Throughout the period, formal war with Spain back home simply excused a range of thefts and raids already under way.

ERAS

The early cycles of piracy were French (1500–1565), Elizabethan English (1568–1603), and Dutch (1599–1648), with the respective arch-pirates—at least from the Spanish perspective—Jacques Sores, Francis Drake, and Piet Heyn. Despite some great losses in the Atlantic, most notably Piet Heyn's 1628 seizure of a treasure fleet along the northern coast of Cuba, Spain's annual silver ship to Manila proved remarkably resistant to pirate attack.

BLACKBEARD

One of the most famous pirates during the early 1700s, Edward Thatch, or "Blackbeard," roamed the waters of the Caribbean and eastern coast of the United States, seizing more than forty vessels during his career. This fearsome legendary figure, who was thought to be of English descent, began his pirating career in 1713 aboard a Jamaican sloop commanded by Benjamin Hornigold. In November 1717 the two men captured a French slave ship, the Concorde.When Hornigold decided shortly afterwards to retire from pirating, Blackbeard took control of the ship, renaming it Queen Anne's Revenge. After continually preying upon merchant ships involved in New World trade, Blackbeard was tracked by the Royal Navy to Ocracoke Inlet, North Carolina, where he was killed in a bloody confrontation on November 22, 1718.

Ryan Peacock

The next cycle, lasting from the 1650s to about 1700, gave rise to the archetypal buccaneers of the Caribbean. Some were escaped slaves and indentured servants, others renegade sailors and even merchants. Buccaneer gangs were typically heterogeneous and prone to turn on unwary sponsors. For this reason the Caribbean buccaneers were perhaps the first multiethnic, freelance pirates to draw substantial, albeit largely ineffective, retribution from distant European states. Some outstanding raiders, such as the Welshman Henry Morgan, were nominally punished by their "mother" states, then rewarded with political office and knighthood. Spanish diplomats were understandably outraged, but in the absence of strong navies, state ambivalence toward piracy prevailed.

Piratical interest in Portuguese vessels concentrated for a time on East Indiamen, but eventually the volume of the Brazilian sugar, tobacco, and slave trades also drew takers. The principal maritime scourge of the Portuguese were the Dutch corsairs, who through company-sponsored privateering raids eviscerated a worldwide Lusophone trading empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. Portuguese slaving posts in western Africa were major targets, and piracy and privateering continued to intersect with the African slave trade throughout early modern times. Indeed, the first Africans to reach Jamestown, Virginia, were taken by Dutch corsairs from Portuguese slavers in 1619. The discovery of gold and diamonds in Brazil in the 1690s also drew an immediate response from pirates, particularly those plying Caribbean and West African waters.

Finally, the famous era of Anglo-American piracy crested in the early eighteenth century, yielding such memorable characters as Blackbeard, "Calico Jack" Rack-ham, Ann Bonny, and Mary Read. These pirates, whose energies were as often directed against English as against Spanish or Portuguese targets, were effectively snuffed out by the English Royal Navy in the 1720s. Rising British sea hegemony and a new "zero tolerance" policy would subsequently dampen but never eliminate world piracy. A great piracy cycle associated with Latin American independence in the 1810s and 1820s is a case in point. A second was a massive piratical eruption in the South China Sea between 1790 and 1810. The former gave rise to the legendary pirate practice of walking the plank, the latter to history's greatest woman pirate, Cheng I Sao, commander of a giant fleet.

RESPONSES AND CONSEQUENCES

Other responses to piracy included assembling merchant vessels into convoys and fortifying port cities with massive stone bastions. In most cases it became the responsibility of merchants, colonists, their offspring and slaves, and native inhabitants to defend themselves and their territories against piratical onslaught. Militias were formed, along with networks of coastal, mostly indigenous, spies. An unexpected consequence of this policy was the formation of interethnic regional identities and disillusionment with the mother country—precursors to independence. Meanwhile, the risk to merchants was sufficient to foster a thriving marine insurance business in major metropolises. Still, elevated costs deriving from losses and defense taxes were usually passed along to less capitalized factors—and of course to consumers. As is true today, storms, reefs, and sandbars remained much greater risks than piracy.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world piracy was mostly kept under control by competing European imperial powers, with the United States playing a minor but growing role. Merchant ships also became bigger and more difficult to attack, but new imperialist strategies, all of them expensive, included farflung coast guards, naval bases, and a general desire to control straits and other vulnerable "choke points." Technological advances in shipbuilding, weapons manufacture, and communications also enabled more efficient interdiction. Finally, diplomacy and stepped-up enforcement of international agreements played key roles. Nevertheless, in wartime and at the fringes, piracy was apt to flare. These predatory outbursts were nothing like those of early modern times, but seafaring opportunists could always be found at the margins of state power.

Piracy in the twentieth century popped up in the interstices amid the chaos of the World Wars and other conflicts, but only in more recent times have genuine piracy cycles of some significance emerged. Leaving politically or religiously motivated hijackings, kidnappings, and terrorist acts aside (these having mostly other than pecuniary aims), there have been at least three distinct trends. First, and most traditionally piratical, have been attacks by criminal gangs on cargo and leisure vessels. The Strait of Malacca and seas off the southwest Philippines have been worst hit, but attacks of this kind have grown worldwide since the 1980s, including in the Lesser Antilles, in coastal and riverine Brazil, and in West Africa. State atrophy has followed the Cold War and decolonization in many regions, emboldening criminal networks on land and at sea. Also, tax- and liability-evasion strategies among shippers have exacerbated problems of prosecution. Second is the preying of pirates upon political refugees and migrant workers, a phenomenon first noted in Southeast Asia in the early 1970s but continuing subsequently in the eastern Pacific, Mediterranean, and elsewhere. Last is piratical poaching on the illegal drug trade, a phenomenon not easily studied or quantified given its secret nature, but likely the most murderous of current forms of maritime predation.

SEE ALSO Empire, British; Empire, Spanish; Gold and Silver;Labor, Types of;Privateering;Ships and Shipping.

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Kris Lane