Privateering

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Privateering

Attacks upon seaborne trade and shipping have been a feature of human maritime activity since the seas were first used for the transport of goods and people. Such violent assaults have assumed various forms; some have been sanctioned by states and therefore deemed legitimate, whereas unauthorized commerce raiders have perpetrated others, often described as pirates. Among those empowered by states to attack shipping was the privateer, a private individual whose predatory activity had two potentially positive attributes. To the state, which authorized the practice by the issuance of a license (variously known as a privateer commission, letter of marque, lettre de marque, or kaapebrief), the privateer offered a cheap means of waging war, the damage inflicted on a rival's maritime assets being of some strategic value. To those individuals who equipped and manned these privately owned ships of war, the rewards were chiefly economic, for privateering was essentially a form of enterprise in which shipowners and seafarers risked their capital and their lives in a quest for prizes and, hence, profits.

Rooted in the medieval practice of reprisal, privateering was increasingly regulated by the legal codes and treaties that governed relations between Europe's maritime states from the sixteenth century. Accordingly, the issue of licenses was largely, though not necessarily, restricted to periods of declared war, and seized vessels and admiralty courts according to the due process of law adjudicated goods. It was only when the court had decided that the capture had been properly conducted that the properties were condemned and released as "good prize" to the captors. If the court found otherwise, however, it could order the errant privateer to restore the captured assets to their rightful owners and pay for the costs and damages the seizure had caused.

Privateering ventures assumed one of two main forms during the early modern era. First, there were licensed trading vessels. These merchantmen were furnished with a privateering license to provide their crews with an incentive to defend the ship against assailants, or to take inferior enemy craft, during the course of their primarily commercial voyages. Such chance encounters might yield prize money to augment seafarers' wages and shipowners' profits. Licensed traders—termed letters of marque in Britain—comprised a numerically significant component of Europe's privateering fleets, especially after 1700. In qualitative terms, too, they were important, for throughout the early modern era most relatively large, long-distance merchant ships were equipped with privateer commissions, and most carried more armaments and men than they would have done in peacetime.

Private ships of war constituted the second type of privateering venture. Rather than carrying cargoes, these vessels—most of which were converted merchantmen—"cruised" the shipping lanes to capture enemy vessels and cargoes. They ranged from small craft, which preyed on fishing and coastal vessels in inshore waters, to ocean-going ships despatched to intercept the high-value colonial cargoes conveyed to Europe in large, well-protected merchantmen. Crews that were large in relation to the vessel's size, and organized to fight the enemy and navigate prizes back to a home port for adjudication invariably worked private ships of war of all calibers. The crews also shared some of the financial risks of the venture, for they were normally remunerated through the ownership of a share in any prize money generated, rather than through the payment of a wage. Crews therefore forsook the money they could have earned in a trading or naval vessel for a stake in the profits of a predatory venture, a decision that might yield anything from a windfall to a nil return.

Whatever its form, privateering was integral to Europe's trading and shipping interests, especially from the 1560s to 1815. But it was an impermanent, volatile activity that varied greatly in scale and character over time and space. In some settings, it was significant both economically and as a means of waging war. In the late sixteenth century, for instance, privateers contributed greatly to the expansion of England's maritime interests. Privately owned vessels embarked for the New World intent on trading with, or raiding, Spain's imperial possessions, a design that was covertly encouraged—if not formally sanctioned—by Elizabeth I's government. Whereas the slaving voyages of Sir John Hawkins (1532–1595) and the circumnavigation of Sir Francis Drake (1540–1596) might be cast as piratical, the private vessels that preyed on Spanish trade during the 1585 to 1603 war largely acted with proper authority. With forty-three merchant-men comprising the backbone of Drake's squadron in the Armada campaign, privateering was the characteristic form of naval warfare in Elizabethan England. Moreover, it generated capital and helped to improve the seafaring labor supply from about 16,000 to 50,000 men, thereby adding impetus to England's emergence as a commercial power.

Spain's maritime interests were further harassed by privately owned Dutch commerce raiders. The semipiratical "Sea Beggars" were central to the Dutch Revolt in 1568 to 1572, whereas commissioned private forces largely dominated the nascent republic's sea war against the Spanish from the late 1570s. Spain moved on to the offensive in the 1620s by encouraging its Flemish subjects to set forth privateers against the republic's rapidly growing trade and fishing interests, a campaign that was supplemented by Spanish naval vessels—the "Armada of Flanders"—based at Dunkirk. This coordinated assault yielded some 1,880 prizes between 1629 and 1639, over 84 percent of which were taken by privateers. Sixty years later, and now a French port, Dunkirk was again the focal point of a major privateering campaign as Louis XIV (1638–1715) reduced expenditure on France's battle fleet and diverted resources into an attack on the "sinews" of the enemy's power, the trade of England and the Dutch Republic. This guerre de course (privateering war) resembled its Flemish-Spanish antecedent in that privateers with the operational and material support of state forces largely undertook it. It was also similar in effect. Although extensive damage was inflicted on enemy commerce, the strategy of guerre de course failed to deliver victory in the sea war.

There were other instances in which the quest for private profit served the military interests of states lacking naval resources, notably the extensive privateering campaigns mounted by the Americans in 1776 to 1783 and 1812 to 1814, and by the Confederacy in 1861 to 1865. In general, however, privateering became more of a business and less of a military tool as state navies developed into effective, permanent fighting forces. Market forces—that is, for instance, increasingly governed the scale and character of British privateering, prize-taking prospects interacting with the supply of vessels and men in the context of a range of commercial options. In the mid-eighteenth-century conflicts, investors in the major ports of London and Bristol fitted out a relatively large number of powerful private ships of war—many over 250 tons worked by crews of at least 150 men—to seize valuable French and Spanish colonial vessels believed to be sailing from the Caribbean without escorts. In contrast, in late 1780, the onset of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War precipitated a different privateering response, as more than 340 private ships of war of less than 100 tons were hurriedly despatched from small south-coast harbors to seize the innumerable unwary Dutch merchantmen thought to be sailing in the English Channel. In the 1793 to 1815 conflicts, with prize-taking opportunities greatly circumscribed by the stranglehold imposed on French trade by the navy, licensed trading vessels dominated British privateering activity.

The privateering business had for centuries stimulated the wartime economies of ports and generated speculative profits for shipowners and seafarers, albeit on an irregular basis. By 1815, such prospects had dimmed appreciably due to the preponderance of navies in the sea war, and the growth of safer, more rewarding commercial options. In the mid-nineteenth century, with steam propulsion and iron hulls now adding to the costs and capabilities of shipping, Britain—which had the most vessels and cargoes to lose—proposed that privateering be abolished. This was enshrined in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, although Spain and the United States did not ratify the agreement until 1907.

SEE ALSO Empire, British; Empire, Spanish; Gold and Silver; Hawkins, John;Piracy;Ships and Shipping;Wars.