Piracy

Piracy, robbery and other high crimes committed at sea. A practice as old as navigation, it became common in Latin America as soon as the Spanish began shipping precious metals from Mexico and Peru. The term has often been used to connote all the maritime attacks carried on by privateers, buccaneers, and other freebooters against Spanish and Portuguese commerce from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. For the Spanish, all of these marauders were pirates. Historically, however, the word has had a more narrow definition, excluding from its meaning those who sailed under some guise of legality through letters of marque or patents from European or American governments. True pirates were those who held no commission from any lawful authority and who could legally be attacked and judged by the authorities of any sovereign state.

The buccaneers were very similar to pirates in their operations, but they enjoyed impunity in the non-Iberian colonies. Thus they operated freely from British, French, Dutch, or Swedish ports in the Caribbean and North America. Port Royal, Jamaica, for example, was a frequent hangout for buccaneers until it sank beneath the sea in the earthquake of 1692. Many of the buccaneers held deep religious convictions stemming from their origins in Puritan, Huguenot, or other Calvinist colonies. After 1670, however, these attributes became less common, and buccaneering deteriorated into outright piracy. Caribbean-based buccaneering, in fact, was a transition from the earlier Old World-based privateering (French "corsairs," Dutch "sea beggars," and English "sea dogs") to the "golden age of piracy" in Latin America from about 1680 to 1720, when dangerous pirate fleets operated in the Caribbean and along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the American mainland. Like the buccaneers Henry Morgan and Richard Sawkins, many of these pirates came from Wales, although other nationalities were well represented among them. Sawkins, one of the last of the buccaneers, is especially representative of the transition from buccaneering to piracy.

A further distinction between pirates and other maritime freebooters of Latin America, although not an absolute one, is that the earlier freebooters preyed primarily on the Spanish and Portuguese, whereas the pirates attacked the commerce of all nations. In the eighteenth century, the maintenance of larger national navies led to the suppression of high crimes on the seas, although sporadic acts of piracy continued to occur throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in politically disturbed areas along Latin American coasts. For example, in the 1980s pirates preyed on yachts and other coastal shipping along the Caribbean shore of Nicaragua.

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean was the haven of many notorious pirates who endangered the commerce of many nations. These pirates depended on light, swift, shallow-draft vessels that could overtake heavier cargo vessels or flee from warships. With the rise of the plantation colonies, many of the ports that had offered sanctuary to the buccaneers became hostile to pirate ships. Therefore, the yet unsettled Bahamas became one of the more important bases for pirates, especially the port of Nassau on New Providence Island, although some pirates still frequented ports in New York and New England with relative impunity. The infamous Captain William Kidd was among the most well known. Like other pirates of this age, he sailed not only in Latin American waters, but also along African, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern coasts as well.

Widespread use of privateers during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) led to an increase in piracy following the Peace of Utrecht (1714) as many of the suddenly unemployed privateers turned to piracy. New Providence Island became a hotbed of pirate operations. Among the most notable of these pirates was Captain Edward Teach ("Blackbeard"), Edward England, Charles Vane, Edward Low, John Evans, and Bartholomew Roberts (more generally known for his exploits off the African coast). Of considerable notoriety, too, were the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who sailed with "Calico Jack" Rackham until they were captured in Jamaica in 1720. Daniel Defoe, writing under the pseudonym of Charles Johnson, popularized these and other pirates of that era in his General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724).

The Nassau pirates were eventually suppressed after the British crown named Captain Woodes Rogers, himself a privateer of great fame, as its governor at Nassau in 1718. He immediately issued a general pardon to those who would abandon piracy and then while still in office (1718–1720, 1729–1732) proceeded to suppress most of the remainder. The emergence of British naval superiority in the eighteenth century was perhaps the major factor in eradicating piracy in American waters. The replacement of much of Spain's commerce by British shipping, especially after the Peace of Utrecht, granted the British the slave asiento for thirty years, gave the British a strong incentive to suppress piracy. Many of the pirates who had thrived earlier in the Caribbean or other Latin American waters now moved their operation to African shores, especially the East African coast, where Madagascar became a fabled pirate's nest.

The Napoleonic wars spawned new fleets of privateers, flying the flags of European nations and of the new Latin American republics, some of which were barely outside the definition of piracy. They played an important role in the Latin American struggles for independence between 1815 and 1821, but some degenerated into Caribbean piracy thereafter. Operating from the numerous inlets in Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, as many as 2,000 pirates preyed upon the growing commerce between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. The United States responded with warships. In a notable encounter off Cape Antonio, Cuba, in 1821, U.S. naval forces captured the notorious Captain Charles Gibbs. When another U.S. force defeated the audacious Cuban pirate "Diabolito" two years later, acts of piracy in the Caribbean dwindled rapidly. The last major act of piracy occurred in September 1832, when the pirate Pedro Gilbert looted and burned the U.S.-registered Mexican en route from Salem to Rio de Janeiro.

Piracy was damaging to the commerce of all nations. But Iberian colonial trade suffered the most depredations, since piracy merely continued the assault on it that Spain's rivals had begun in the sixteenth century. British commercial and naval superiority in the eighteenth century led to its suppression, and in modern times naval technology and firepower have greatly reduced its importance in Latin American waters.

See alsoBuccaneers and Freebooters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There is a vast popular literature on piracy, much of it dealing with buccaneers and privateers as well as pirates. There are several modern editions of Daniel Defoe's classic General History of the … Pyrates, including those edited by William Graves (1972) and by Manuel Schonhorn (1972). Especially useful for reference on individual pirates is Philip Gosse, The History of Piracy (1932) and his highly useful biographical dictionary of pirates, buccaneers, and other freebooters, The Pirates' Who's Who (1924). Among the general works on piracy see Neville Williams, Captains Outrageous: Seven Centuries of Piracy (1961), and Douglas Botting, The Pirates (1978). Jenifer Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean (1992), a useful overview of the whole range of foreign interlopers in the Caribbean, also includes several chapters on piracy. George Woodbury, The Great Days of Piracy in the West Indies (1951); Hugh F. Rankin, The Golden Age of Piracy (1969); Frank Sherry, Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy (1986); Clinton V. Black, Pirates of the West Indies (1989) (with biographical sketches of leading buccaneers and pirates from Morgan to Nicholas Brown) all focus on the peak period of piratical activity in the Caribbean. Peter T. Bradley's thoroughly documented The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598–1701 (1989) is more concerned with buccaneers than pirates, but is useful for its focus on the viceroyalty of Peru. See also the many books on individual pirates.

Additional Bibliography

Corcuera Ibáñez, Mario. El coraje y el fuego: De piratas y corsarios desde Polícrates a Bouchard. Buenos Aires: Librería Histórica, 2004.

Lane, Kris E. Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

Lucena Salmoral, Manuel. Piratas, bucaneros, filibusteros y corsarios en América: Perros, mendigos y otros malditos del mar. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992.

                              Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.