Golden Age of Piracy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Golden Age of Piracy, a stretch of maritime robbery that shaped the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans between the 1650s and the 1730s, may not have been golden for very long. In his 2005 book The History of Pirates, the historian Angus Konstam argued that the worst excesses were squeezed into eight years, from 1714 until 1722. He concluded that the true Golden Age "cannot even be called a 'golden decade.'" That raises a puzzle. If the peak was so short, why do historians still argue over where the age begins and ends? Who were the men and women who took to the sea as pirates, and what pushed them there? Why did the Caribbean lose its grip on them, and why did some sail all the way to Madagascar? And how much of the swashbuckler in the modern imagination was ever real?

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• 2. Counting The Years

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  In 1894 the English journalist George Powell reviewed Charles Leslie's A New and Exact History of Jamaica, a book already more than 150 years old. He mentioned "What appears to have been the golden age of piracy up to the last decade of the 17th century," and never used the phrase again. The historian John Fiske made it a proper term in 1897. He dated the golden age from about 1650 to about 1720, and he folded in the Barbary corsairs and the pirates of East Asia. Fiske also hotly denied that Elizabethan figures such as Drake were pirates at all. Patrick Pringle disagreed in 1951, describing the most flourishing era of piracy as one that began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ended in the second decade of the eighteenth century. After that, the trend ran toward shrinking the age. Philip Gosse put the height of piracy at 1680 until 1730 in 1924. Douglas Botting, in his popular 1978 book The Pirates, allowed barely 30 years, and Frank Sherry followed him in 1986. Marcus Rediker narrowed it further in a 1989 article, to just 1716-1726, while Konstam in 1998 chose 1700 until 1730. Then the pendulum swung back. David Cordingly's influential 1994 work Under the Black Flag described a great age of piracy from the 1650s to around 1725, close to Fiske's view. In 2004 Rediker offered his most layered version, a span from roughly 1650 to 1730 divided into three generations. Those generations were the buccaneers of 1650-1680, the Indian Ocean pirates of the 1690s, and the pirates of 1716-1726. Narrow definitions sometimes drop the first two, but most keep at least part of the third.

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• 3. The Buccaneers

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  By 1625, French buccaneers had settled on the northern coast of Hispaniola, living more as hunters of pigs and cattle than as robbers. Their name came from the buccan, the wooden frame they used to smoke their meat. Spain tried to wipe out both the buccaneers and the animals they lived on, and that pressure pushed them toward full-time piracy. They moved to the more defensible offshore island of Tortuga, where limited resources sharpened their appetite for raids. According to the buccaneer and chronicler Alexandre Exquemelin, a Tortuga man named Pierre Le Grand pioneered attacks on galleons carrying treasure home to Spain. Another Frenchman, François l'Olonnais, whose real name was Jean-David Nau, became notorious for his cruelty toward Spanish prisoners. Martinique served as a home port for buccaneers like him. John Fiske and other historians mark 1650 as the starting point of the Golden Age, because the end of the Wars of Religion let European powers resume building colonial empires, and much of the new wealth traveled by ship. The English capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 fed the boom. Early English governors there handed out letters of marque freely, and the growing town of Port Royal gave raiders a far better place to sell their loot. In the 1660s the new French governor of Tortuga, Bertrand d'Ogeron, issued privateering commissions to his own colonists and to English cutthroats from Port Royal. Over time the buccaneers gained many English and Dutch recruits, and their alliances produced the Brethren of the Coast. Their background as frontier hunters also made them prized for marksmanship and skirmishing. The peak came with Henry Morgan's expedition against Panama in 1670, when the city was plundered, with sacking and burning following the next year. Spain's crown finally responded by authorizing privateering against pirates and contraband, an old tool used only sparingly before. That decision created the guarda costa, who would matter far more in the following century.

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• 4. The Pirate Round

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  In 1692 an earthquake devastated Port Royal and destroyed the chief market where pirates sold fenced plunder. That was only one of several blows to the Caribbean trade. The Glorious Revolution restored the old enmity between Britain and France, ending the profitable partnership between English Jamaica and French Tortuga. Colonial governors also abandoned the traditional policy of "no peace beyond the Line," which had kept war, and so letters of marque, alive in the Caribbean whatever treaties said in Europe. From then on, commissions came only in wartime, with strict limits. Meanwhile the Spanish Main was picked over. Maracaibo alone was sacked three times between 1667 and 1678, Río de la Hacha was raided five times, and Tolú eight. Some pirates from New England and the Middle Colonies kept targeting Spain's Pacific coast, but the Indian Ocean offered more. India's economic output dwarfed Europe's, and its silk and calico made ideal booty. No powerful navy patrolled those waters, which left local ships and the vessels of the East India companies exposed. At home, England's less-favored colonies, including Bermuda, New York and Rhode Island, were short of cash because of the Navigation Acts. Merchants and governors there were willing to look away from pirate voyages, or even pay for them. One colonial official defended a pirate by calling it "very harsh to hang people that brings in gold to these provinces." The voyages ran from Caribbean and North American ports to bases such as Madagascar, aimed at Muslim and East India Company ships in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. This is the period of Thomas Tew, Robert Culliford, and Henry Every. Every is one of the few major captains to retire with his loot, neither arrested nor killed, after capturing the enormously rich Mogul ship Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695. William Kidd, whose guilt remains controversial, was executed at Execution Dock in London in 1701. He is remembered for the buried treasure he supposedly left behind.

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• 5. Republic Of Nassau

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  Peace treaties in 1713 and 1714 ended the War of the Spanish Succession and released thousands of seamen from military service, including European privateers who had worked the West Indies. The timing mattered, because colonial shipping across the Atlantic was just beginning to boom. A good deal of that trade ran in triangles. Ships carried manufactured goods and weapons from Europe to Africa for enslaved people, sold them in the Caribbean, and returned home with sugar, tobacco and cocoa. A second route took raw materials, preserved cod and rum to Europe, then manufactured goods to the Caribbean, and sugar and molasses back to New England. The British South Sea Company also won the asiento, a Spanish contract to supply slaves to Spain's New World colonies. That opened formerly closed markets to British traders and smugglers, and it helped spread piracy across the western Atlantic. Merchant shippers used the surplus of labor to push wages down and cut corners, and conditions aboard became wretched. Merchant sailors died at rates as high as, or higher than, the enslaved people they carried. Many sailors came to prefer the freer life of a pirate, and the heavy traffic could feed a large body of brigands. In 1715 pirates raided Spanish divers who were trying to recover gold from the sunken treasure galleon Urca de Lima near Florida. The core of the force was a group of English ex-privateers: Henry Jennings, Charles Vane, Samuel Bellamy, Benjamin Hornigold and Edward England. The attack worked, but the governor of Jamaica refused to let Jennings and his companions spend their loot on his island. With Kingston and the declining Port Royal shut to them, the pirates settled at Nassau, on New Providence in the Bahamas. It became home to the so-called Republic of Pirates until Governor Woodes Rogers arrived in 1718. Rogers and other British governors could offer pardons under the King's Act of Grace. Hornigold accepted and turned privateer, while Blackbeard went back to piracy after his pardon.

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• 6. Life And Battle

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  Most pirates of the era were English, Welsh, Dutch, Irish or French, and many came from poor urban districts such as the ports of London. Several conditions made their trade possible: more valuable cargoes crossing vast stretches of ocean, thinner European navies in some regions, sailors trained by those navies, and corrupt, ineffective colonial governments. Many pirates had once served in the Royal Navy, as privateersmen, or on merchant ships. Navy sailors often went hungry at sea and fell sick or died, and some deserted the king for piracy. Aboard a pirate ship, the crew held nearly as much power as the captain. The captain had full authority only in battle, and he could be removed if he showed cowardice. He was also expected to be bold, since pirates did not want to repeat the navy's hierarchy. The pirate code covered weapons too, and a man who failed to clean and maintain his arms could be punished. Duels settled disputes and filled vacancies in leadership, though they seldom ended in death. Buccaneers sharpened their aim by shooting a doubloon out of the air with a musket, and other pirates drilled with their cannons while searching for prey. Many were war veterans. William Dampier had been a Royal Navy sailor in the Anglo-Dutch War, and a companion named Swan had fought in the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. In battle, the favorite weapon was fear. Pirates raised their flags and fired a broadside to announce their intentions. Sam Bellamy once had his men strip naked before an attack on a French ship, and the sight alone made the French sailors surrender. Quiet raids in small boats, sometimes under enemy flags, were common. Captain Josiah Burgess captured three Royal Navy warships at once, the Winchelsea, the Tryall and the Swift, by paddling canoes up to them at night while their crews were ashore fetching fresh water. When resisted, pirates closed on the bow and fired chain shot to bring down the target's mast. Swivel guns then loosed "angrage," a deadly mix of nails, bolts and musket balls, across the deck. Joseph Bannister beat two warships by putting cannons on shore above the water. Blackbeard pulled off a naval blockade at Charleston, South Carolina, and Henry Morgan and Charles Vane both used fire ships.

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• 7. Notorious Names

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  More than 40 women went to sea as pirates during the Golden Age. The best known are Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who met and joined John Rackham's crew. They were captured on the 22nd of October 1720, and both claimed to be pregnant to delay their death sentences. Read died in jail months later. Bonny vanishes from the record, with no trace of an execution or a birth, though in December 1733 the burial of a woman named Ann Bonny was noted in Jamaica. Rackham himself was hanged and gibbeted outside Port Royal in 1720, and Mary Critchett, a former prisoner who became a pirate, was hanged in 1729. Spain built its own answer to the raiders. Bourbon naval reforms, shaped by Admiral Blas de Lezo, sought an alliance between privateers and the Spanish Navy, and the result was the guarda costa. They sailed lightweight piragua crewed by Spaniards and local natives, and they fought piracy effectively across the West Indies. Critics called them brutal and indiscriminate, and they sometimes joined in smuggling and unsanctioned piracy themselves. By the 1720s they were operating on the mainland, notably in Florida. The Spanish corsair Amaro Pargo ruled the route between Cádiz and the Caribbean, and legend has tied him to hidden treasure and secret romances. On his tomb in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, the headstone carries a skull and crossbones with a winking right eye. Among the English-speaking captains, Samuel Bellamy was nicknamed the "Robin Hood of pirates" and prided himself on his reasons for the trade. His ship, the Whydah Gally, was lost in a storm off Cape Cod in 1717. Stede Bonnet, a wealthy Barbadian landowner, turned pirate purely for adventure. He raided ships off Virginia in 1717 in a 10-gun sloop called the Revenge, and was hanged in 1718. Bartholomew Roberts, with over 400 ship captures, is considered by many the most successful Western pirate ever. Edward Low, born in Westminster, was active from 1721 to 1724 and never caught. He was infamous for torturing victims, cutting off ears, lips and noses. Edward Teach, called Blackbeard, was active from 1716 to 1718, and his Queen Anne's Revenge was named in response to the end of Queen Anne's War. One of Lieutenant Robert Maynard's crewmen killed him in 1718. Charles Vane, once Jennings's subordinate, was harsh and unpopular, and his crew marooned him before he was captured and hanged in 1721. Henry Morgan, meanwhile, was due to be executed in England. He was knighted instead, made governor of Jamaica, and died a natural death in 1688.

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• 8. Decline And Legend

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  By early 1719 the remaining pirates were on the run, and most headed for West Africa to seize poorly defended slave ships. Without a safe base and under growing naval pressure, the hunters gradually became the hunted. Some veterans of the Republic of Pirates revived the Pirate Round between 1719 and 1730, working from Madagascar. Among them were Edward England, John Taylor, Christopher Condent and Olivier Levasseur, known as La Buse. In 1721, at Réunion, Taylor and Levasseur took the Portuguese East Indiaman Nossa Senhora do Cabo. Diamonds and other treasures worth £800,000 made it the greatest prize of the Golden Age. Condent also prospered, but England did not. Taylor and Levasseur marooned him on Comoros that same year, and he died not long afterward. Levasseur never enjoyed his riches. He was captured and hanged on the 7th of July 1730, unlike many of his contemporaries who escaped to retire. Historians treat the deaths of Roberts in 1722, Fly in 1726 and Levasseur in 1730 as the markers of the age's end. Marcus Rediker uses the 1726 execution of William Fly in particular. The stories lived on in print. In 1724, Captain Charles Johnson published A General History of the Pirates, the source for many biographies of famous pirates. Its accuracy has been questioned, and it gives an almost mythical glow to colorful figures such as Blackbeard and John Rackham. Introducing a new edition in 2002, the naval historian David Cordingly wrote: "...Captain Johnson created the modern conception of pirates." The book influenced the pirate fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson and J. M. Barrie. Some details of the image are real. Pirates wore gold or silver earrings, hoping to pay for a decent burial, or believing the metal had magical healing powers. The eyepatch is mostly a myth from nineteenth century novels and tales of buccaneers that paid compensation for a lost eye. Later inventions such as Talk Like a Pirate Day push the picture toward a romantic, treasure-burying swashbuckler. Few historical pirates wore patches, though the 18th century Arab pirate Rahmah ibn Jabir al-Jalahimah did.

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