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HOSTES HUMANI GENERIS:

PIRACY ON THE OF EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF SAIL

A Thesis

Presented to the faculty of the Department of History

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

History

by

Aaron James Jackson

FALL 2016

i

© 2016

Aaron James Jackson

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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HOSTES HUMANI GENERIS:

PIRACY ON THE TIDES OF EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF SAIL

A Thesis

by

Aaron James Jackson

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Dr. Michael Vann

______, Second Reader Dr. Jeffrey Wilson

______Date

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Student: Aaron James Jackson

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______Dr. Rebecca Kluchin Date

Department of History

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Abstract

of

HOSTES HUMANI GENERIS:

PIRACY ON THE TIDES OF EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF SAIL

by

Aaron James Jackson

Pirates are a fascinating subject, inspiring authors and filmmakers alike with dramatic and romantic tales of daring and adventure to create works of fiction like Island, Peter Pan, and Pirates of the . Pirates have inspired historians to explore topics ranging from crews’ proto-democratic organization to their role in developing world systems of trade and cultural exchange. Few, however, have examined how pirates helped to establish the great

European maritime empires, which emerged from the relative backwater of sixteenth-century

Europe to conquer distant lands and peoples, master global trade winds and tides, and muscle their way into every corner of the globe by the nineteenth century. Emerging theories in the discipline of world history appear to provide the most promising explanations of European ascendancy by emphasizing global systemic connections and contingencies. Systemic of economic connections and commodities have provided historians with a much better understanding of the past, and this of piracy fits this mold. Piracy was both a form of economic connection and commodity, particularly when defined as the use of violence to achieve economic gains. As this paper show, Europe’s maritime empires, and the in particular, traded this commodity heavily between the late-fifteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

The Early Modern Era was a bigger world than the one we occupy today. Reliant upon the trade winds and favorable seas to connect the imperial metropole with its colonies, the British

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Empire relied on a collection of frontiers to fuel its economic engines. In these frontiers, pirates helped build the British Empire, their crimes later justified its centralized authority and the state monopoly on violence, and their continued existence served as a laboratory for developing new methods of international power relations. In these ways and more, pirates deserve a great deal more credit and attention from scholarly circles.

Unfortunately for historians, pirates rarely left detailed documents outlining their actions and motives, but Subaltern Studies methodology provides a potential solution. While researching colonial Indian peasant uprisings against the British for his 1983 book, Elementary Aspects of

Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Ranajit Guha encountered difficulties in finding primary source material portraying the peasants’ perspectives, which is not surprising given that colonial

Indian peasants were largely illiterate. Guha could discern their perspectives by deciphering coded language in the abundance of British documents—by reading against the grain of the biased documentary record. Similarly, the clear majority of primary source material on piracy originates from official British documents, including trial transcripts, colonial correspondence, the occasional journal entry, and contemporary literature and newspaper articles. The government sources are often biased, of course, but Guha’s methodology provides a filter to deal with source prejudice.

Contemporary literature, such as the works of Daniel Dafoe or the infamous A General History of the Pyrates, is often embellished for entertainment value, making the separation of fact from fiction difficult. But cross-referencing this literature with sources less likely to be embellished allows one to sift through the chaff and acquire a contextual understanding of piracy. Finally, a wealth of secondary source material is available to assist in parsing the primary documentation. For example,

Marcus Rediker’s work on the social history of outlaws and the provides invaluable contextual information, Linda Colley’s work on captivity narratives provides insight into the victims of piracy as well as the nature of empire, K.N. Chaudhuri’s work illuminates the

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pre-European trade systems in the that European empires and pirates alike would later prey upon, and Sven Beckert’s work provides an example of a global analysis of commodity exchange. World history methodologies provide frameworks in which to draw connections between seemingly separate areas and events to depict the bigger picture.

Both pirates and empires have been the subjects of many historical studies, but few historians have sought to explore their interrelated natures in their European manifestations. Building an empire requires the use or threat of violence to establish a dominance relationship through which the empire draws upon the resources of the conquered—essentially piracy writ large. The development of the British Empire, with its mercantile foundations, was not a simple expression of force relationships from the beginning. It developed slowly, expanding more often through the efforts of its merchants than its , and in such an environment, the empire relied on the skills of pirates to acquire the resources and corresponding power required to become the largest and most influential maritime power to date. Exploring the roles pirates played in the development of imperial systems helps historians to better understand the nature, scope, and function of early modern structures that serve as the foundation for the modern era. Understanding how piracy shaped early modern empires, therefore, tells us a great deal about ourselves.

______, Committee Chair Dr. Michael Vann

______Date

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DEDICATION

For Liam Cleo Jackson, my son, who daily reminds me that ours is a wondrous world, that imagination is powerful, that curiosity is cultivated, that patience can be hard, that courage and kindness go hand in hand, and that our past shapes our future in unexpected ways.

May he ever chase the horizon, knowing which stars will guide him home.

May he receive and appreciate fair winds, be brave enough to weather the storms, and generous in helping others. May he seek his fortune, whatever that may be, and find more value in the journey than in the destination.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis is the result of over a year of effort. Reading, researching, writing, and editing, often into the wee hours of the night for weeks on end. And while the bags under my and the callouses of my fingertips provide ample evidence of the work involved, none of it would have been possible without the help and support of others.

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the faculty of the History Department at

State University, Sacramento. I would first like to thank my program advisor, Dr. Mona Siegel, who not only made me feel at home as an out-of-state transfer student but also challenged me as a writer and historian. I can always count on Dr. Siegel to provide honest and fair critique—including the identification of my love affair with the em dash—as well as support. She pushed me to not only pursue excellence in the classroom, but to expand out into conferences and symposia. If I am honest, I likely would not have ventured into these essential parts of a historian’s career without her persuasion. Drs. Rebecca Kluchin, Michael Vann, Candace Gregory-Abbott, Jeffrey Wilson,

Aaron Cohen, Patrick Ettinger, Paula Austin, and Brendan Lindsay all deserve recognition as well.

These professors’ wisdom and example have been instrumental in who I am as a writer, historian, and teacher, and I would be remiss if I did not let them know how grateful I am.

To Drs. Michael Vann and Jeffrey Wilson, I owe a special debt of gratitude. First for agreeing to be my advisors for this thesis and second for continuing to provide useful and enlightening insight throughout the entirety of this project. Dr. Vann’s insightful guidance and focus helped make this paper possible. His New Imperialism and World History courses were instrumental in planting the seeds of this work. Dr. Wilson’s advice and enthusiasm inspired me to explore new avenues in my research while simultaneously reminding me to stay as concise as possible. I could not have asked for better advisors.

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I also owe a word of thanks to my peers, whose support has been invaluable. In these past two- and-a-half years, I can honestly say that I have formed bonds of friendship as strong and lasting as those I share with fellow veterans. In both cases, mutual friendship sustained us through our labors; like oxen tied to the same yoke, each of us felt the support of the others and suffered less because we knew that we were suffering together. I look forward to celebrating our future successes together as well. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Scott Sault, Robert Miller, Antoine Johnson,

Vanessa Madrigal-Lauchland, Bill Archer, Saeeda Islam, and Haley Reid—all of whom helped me work through the concepts of this thesis, to refine my arguments, and improve my narratives.

Finally, words cannot properly express the gratitude I have for the steadfast support of my family and particularly the love of my life, Lauren Bailey Jackson, who has made my pursuit of a career in history possible since the very beginning by encouraging the pursuit of my passion. That she has also agreed on several occasions to serve as an extra set of eyes on my papers, as a sounding board for my ideas, and as Devil’s advocate for my arguments has been the icing on the cake. I am truly blessed by whatever powers that be to have such a partner beside me as we navigate this life together. Thank you, my dear. I love you, forever and always.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Dedication ...... viii

Acknowledgements ...... ix

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION: PIRACY AND EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF “DISCOVERY” ...... 1

Piracy: Modern Conceptions and Origins ...... 1

Oriental Ambitions: Armed Mercantilism in the Indian Ocean ...... 3

European Exceptionalism: Teleological Explanations of Hegemony ...... 11

Perspectives: ReOrienting the Past through World History ...... 13

Definitions: , Corsairs, Pirates, and ...... 14

Chasing the Dragon: Sixteenth-Century English Ambitions ...... 16

2. CARVING OUT AN EMPIRE: FREEBOOTING ON THE FRONTIER ...... 17

Sir John Hawkins: and Innovation in the Atlantic ...... 17

Sir : Piracy and a Voyage `Round the World ...... 24

Sir : Soldier and Pragmatic Piracy ...... 34

The : Corporate Raiding in the Orient ...... 39

William Dampier: Buccaneer, Explorer, Imperial Muse ...... 42

From Freebooting to Free Trade: Pirate Contributions to the English Empire ...... 50

3. SECURING THE EMPIRE: JACK TAR, LIBERTALIA, AND CIVILIZATION ...... 52

Labor at Sea: Jack Tar’s Poor Wages ...... 52

Seeking Fortune: Privateering and ...... 54

Hunting Exceeding Treasure: English Piracy in the Indian Ocean ...... 58

Seeking Safe Harbor: Colony ...... 60

A Legend is Born: Henry Avery, the Pirate King ...... 62

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Imperial Wrath: International Implications of English Piracy ...... 64

In War’s Wake: Instability in the Caribbean ...... 67

Idle Hands: and the Flying Gang ...... 69

Going a Wrecking: Reaping the Gale on the Coast ...... 70

Bahamian Gold Rush: The Making of a Pirate Nest ...... 72

Jack Tar’s Revenge: Black Sam Bellamy, Prince of Pirates ...... 75

Libertalia Realized: The Pirate Commonwealth in Nassau ...... 77

A New Legend: , Terror of the Atlantic ...... 80

Civilization’s Champion: The Tale of ...... 83

Corruption’s Wages: The Murder of Edward Thatch ...... 91

The Empire Strikes Back: The End of English Piracy in the Periphery ...... 94

4. CONCLUSIONS: IMPERIAL PIRACY AND WESTERN HEGEMONY ...... 97

Persistent Resistance: Late-Eighteenth Century Context ...... 97

Oriental Enterprise: Extending Imperial Control in Asia ...... 99

Losing the Frontier: The American Colonies and the War for Independence ...... 101

Lessons Learned: The Trade and Celestial Authority ...... 103

Limiting Competition: The Turkey Trade and the Barbary States ...... 105

Piracy Politics: The First American-Barbary War ...... 106

Arriving at an Accord: Gunboats, Cartels, and the Triumph of Free Trade ...... 109

Conclusion: Conceptions Revisited ...... 114

Bibliography ...... 121

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. Pre-European Trade Routes in the Indian Ocean & Portuguese Expansion ...... 6

2. A Map of the ...... 23

3. Drake in the Pacific ...... 28

4. A Map of the Spice Islands ...... 41

5. A Map of the East Indies ...... 44

6. New Providence Island ...... 77

7. Captain Teach commonly call’d Black ...... 80

8. The ...... 106

9. The British Empire in 1897 ...... 117

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1

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: PIRACY AND THE AGE OF “DISCOVERY”

The potential implications of globalization have inspired historians to explore the development of modern economic and political systems. For many, a logical starting point in such exploration is to trace the routes of the modern empires, particularly the British Empire, and for good reason. No other empire in history spanned as much territory or had as much influence on the development of modern economies—both directly through its colonies and indirectly through its interactions with the rest of the world—as that of the British. The Empire also had immense influence on the development of modern society and the field of History. Indeed, British influence on the modern world, and that of the West in general, is hard to miss with generations of historians taking a teleological approach to explaining the development of western hegemony at the end of the nineteenth century. However, such histories tend to emphasize imperial agency and overlook potentially embarrassing but important factors in the development of western imperial systems, such as piracy. Exploring the role piracy played in the development of the British Empire, therefore, can provide a better understanding of the modern world.

Piracy: Modern Conceptions and Origins

Pirates are fascinating subjects for fiction and history alike, evoking dramatic stories of adventurous outlaws in exotic garb, possibly sporting a peg leg, , or parrot on their shoulder while seeking treasure in whatever way they could. As outlaws, pirates were rarely keen on leaving records for posterity, so their stories have understandable gaps in the documentary records. Popular fiction has filled these gaps with fantastic leaps of imagination, as evidenced by

Robert Louis Stevenson’s character Long John , Errol Flynn’s portrayal of , and most recently Johnny Depp’s iconic role as Captain , which helps fuel a modern

2 global economic empire of its own through movies, merchandise, and theme parks. But historians do not enjoy such luxuries of imagination; they must seek out evidence, which can be elusive when dealing with a subject full of criminals who could expect to hang if authorities acquired evidence of their crimes. But pirates were not always universally outlaws. Indeed, some pirates became national heroes, for whom an abundance of information remains. Whether outlaws or heroes,

European pirates had a profound effect on their contemporary societies.

If the European empires are in many ways responsible for the shape of the modern world, understanding how those empires developed in the Early Modern Era can prove similarly enlightening in understanding modern issues like globalization and international power dynamics.

During the Age of Sail—roughly the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries—the European empires established and extended their global reach, and pirates played a pivotal role in that development.

Pirates served as mechanisms of empire by first facilitating colonial enterprise and international trade into the frontiers, by later serving as a justification for centralized control of the frontiers, and finally through the development of effective imperial methods that essentially incorporated piracy at a national level. By sailing thus, on the tides of empire, pirates left a legacy that consists of more than treasure maps and parrots; theirs is the legacy of armed trading, gunboat diplomacy, and the of globalization.

Modern conceptions of piracy mask its realities in many ways. For instance, while the very word “pirate” may evoke imagery of Disney animatronics with English accents, spiced rum labels depicting a smiling buccaneer dressed in a frock coat from the Stuart period, or perhaps the famous woodcut of Blackbeard and his brace of pistols and tri-point hat, not all pirates were English or even European. Pirates have existed in nearly every culture, since the earliest times. Indeed, pirates still exist today and carry out their business in much the same ways as they have since antiquity.

The great Roman archivist Plutarch described how Mediterranean pirates captured a young Julius

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Caesar and demanded a ransom of twenty talents, causing Caesar to laugh at them for “not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty.”1 Mediterranean corsairs raided shipping for goods and slaves to row their galleys well into the nineteenth century. Entire cultures and civilizations, particularly in Southeast Asia and North Africa, relied on forms of piracy as the basis of their economies. In some cultures, piracy was a family business, as it was for the

Angria family on the Malabar coast of India, who made their living plundering East India Company ships in the early-eighteenth century. And the most dangerous and formidable pirates were not

European at all, but Chinese. Operating in the early nineteenth century, a force of some forty thousand pirates on a fleet of four hundred junks terrorized every coastline in the South China Sea.

Even more remarkable, this impressive force was led by a former Canton prostitute called Mrs.

Cheng, demonstrating that even the gender most often associated with pirates can be challenged by historical facts.2 Given all of this, how is it that modern imagery of pirates tends to focus primarily on the seventeenth-century European variety? As with many interpretations, this has to do with the ways in which the history has formed over the years.

Oriental Ambitions: Armed Mercantilism in the Indian Ocean

As with piracy, the British did not invent the concept of empire, but one would be hard- pressed to argue that theirs has not been one of the most influential empires of the Early Modern and Modern Eras. The truism that “history is written by the victors” is nowhere more evident than when it comes to the great empires. Empires were conquerors of nations and peoples. As

1 Plutarch, Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library Edition, vol. VII (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1919), 447. The pirates who captured Caesar were the Cilician pirates, who took advantage of an unstable Mediterranean political environment of a weakening Seleucid Empire and a burgeoning slave trade to practice their trade. Caesar’s partner in the First Triumvirate, Magnus, dealt with the Cilician pirates in much the same way that Woodes Rogers dealt with the Caribbean pirates, eighteen centuries later. 2 David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (New York: Random House, 2006), xv-xvi.

4 conquerors, they often built monuments—such as the Aztec pyramids, the Khmer city of Angkor

Wat, the Great Wall of China, and the Roman Coliseum—to express their grandeur and might, not only in their own times but also as a legacy for posterity. The British certainly fit this self- aggrandizing mold, but they left monuments of a different nature than the empires of antiquity, though no less impressive. It is perhaps fitting that modern best monumentalizes

Britain’s seaborne empire, with the Prime Meridian running through Greenwich, . Indeed, one needs only determine their longitude to know just how far they are from the heart of the British

Empire. And like other empires before them, the British largely wrote their own histories, exercising editorial authority on what they included and what they left out. Some of the most popular resulting histories—including the works of Jules Michelet, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and George Bancroft—portrayed the dominance of western civilization as the inevitable result of

Protestant work ethic combined with values of entrepreneurial liberty and capitalism inherent in the West.3 With an almost heroic historical narrative explaining western hegemony, it should not be surprising that modern imagery of pirates in many ways still resembles the imagery so popular in Britain at the height of their powers: as roguish outlaws, nearly universally dirty, drunk, and rude, yet also adventurous and almost noble in their own way. To understand this imagery, one must examine the history of the British Empire, and to understand that, one must grasp the context of the fifteenth-century world.

3 Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 27-28; Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. Charles Cocks, ed. Gordon Wright (: H.G. Bohn, 1967); Thomas Babington Macaulay, from the Accession of James II, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1953); George Bancroft, History of the United States of America from the Discovery of the Continent, 10 vols. (: Little, Brown and Company, 1861).

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Any casual observer would be hard pressed to pick Europe to emerge out of the fifteenth century as a dominant force, and even more so for England.4 Europe was a backwater. While

Muslim trade networks connected peoples across the Indian Ocean from East Africa to the Spice

Islands in the Molucca Sea and beyond, the European kingdoms were only beginning to emerge from the Middle Ages with a developing taste for Eastern imports of spices, luxury items, and sugar. Indeed, it was the Crusades that introduced, or perhaps reintroduced, Europe to the products of the Orient, including the Muslim practice of sugar cultivation—a very labor-intensive process necessitating a constant supply of slaves. The Italian city-states of and prospered in this environment not only by direct trade between Europe and the Levant but also by supporting

Crusader endeavors, for which they sometimes received feudal land grants where their merchant families would establish sugar plantations. The Venetians and Genovese jealously guarded their access to these trade networks and resisted any intrusion by other European powers. When the

Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453, however, Europe’s tenuous connections with the East were severely hampered. The Ottomans not only raised the price of eastern goods to incredibly high levels, they severely restricted Christian access to traditional slave markets in the

Black Sea, paving the way for new European players to enter the world trade scene.5 The

Portuguese, restricted from making inroads into the Mediterranean by the Italian city-states, began to look further afield.

4 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford: , 1989), 4. 5 Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 2nd ed. Studies in Comparative World History (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10.

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Figure 1: Pre-European Trade Routes in the Indian Ocean & Portuguese Expansion. , A New Map of the World According to the Wrights Alias Mercators Projection &c., London: Richard Mount and Thomas Page, 1705. Source: Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc., Digital Image. Modified to highlight locations and trade routes mentioned in text.

Just as the Ottomans began to restrict access in the Levant, the Portuguese began to establish trading posts along the coast of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in . Initial attempts to barter with the natives of the Guinea coast produced some gold dust and access to new supplies of slaves, both of which Prince Henry—also known as Henry the Navigator—used to buoy the Portuguese economy and finance further exploratory expeditions and slave raids down the

African coast.6 In other words, Portuguese ships prowled the African coasts ready to trade or raid as the situation allowed, and the value of the trade was such that the Portuguese began to build factories, feitorias, or permanent trading posts—often protected by castles and artillery—to better facilitate continuous trade and garner further investment from Portuguese merchants.7 But as

6 C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825 (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1969), 24. 7 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 25.

7 valuable as these new trade routes were for the Portuguese, the ultimate goal of tapping into eastern markets remained elusive until much later in the century.

The conclusion of the Reconquista in brought yet another player into the world scene.

Eager to enter the competition for a new route to the Orient, Ferdinand and Isabel were willing to take a risk on a wild plan presented by a Genoese sailor, crusader, and former corsair who made a living plundering Venetian merchant ships and who now claimed to be able to bypass the Ottoman and Venetian monopoly on eastern trade by sailing west around the world. Only a few years’ prior,

Queen Isabel turned Columbus down when her advisors pointed out that he incorrectly calculated the circumference of the earth. But, elated by the completion of the Reconquista with the conquest of Muslim Grenada, Isabel consented to finance Columbus’s expedition despite her doubts of its success.8 In 1492, Columbus set sail into the Atlantic Ocean and returned the following year, claiming a successful voyage to the East Indies. Columbus’s “discovery” was not, of course, a route to Asia, but it sparked a dispute regarding the ownership of new lands, regardless. The Treaty of

Tordesillas in 1494 resolved the dispute by granting papal sanction to the idea that all non-Christian lands west of an imaginary line in the middle of the Atlantic belonged to Spain while everything east belonged to . Neither kingdom had yet to make contact with Asia. Indeed, both were still relatively poor European states with little influence beyond the range of their guns; yet both were willing to go to war for the right to claim the Indies for their own, demonstrating that from the very beginning, Europeans viewed the rest of the world as a place to be conquered, and within two decades, the conquests would begin.

Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India and back between 1497 and 1499 demonstrated

Portuguese intentions, as well as their relative weakness and poverty, quite succinctly. Upon

8 Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, Third Edition (Armonk, New York & London, England: M.E. Sharpe, 2013), 58-59.

8 rounding the and discovering the rich trading ports along the Swahili coast of

East Africa, da Gama noted the wealth of Indian Ocean trade—a trade dominated by Muslims who were, suprisingly to Portuguese perspectives, relatively peaceful.

Vasco da Gama’s surprise at finding peaceful Muslim traders is not itself surprising when one considers the history of Christian Iberians and Muslims. Muslim armies of the Umayyad

Caliphate invaded the in 711, and from that time until the fall of Grenada in 1492, a general state of war between Christians and Muslims existed in Iberia. But the spread of Islam in the Indian Ocean was often less violent than it was throughout the Mediterranean. Arab merchants who plied the Indian Ocean from the seventh century onwards did not travel with their families, and given the seasonal nature of the monsoon winds, they often spent long periods away from home. These merchants usually took wives—temporary or otherwise—from among the women of the ports where they stayed while waiting for the monsoon winds to shift, and the children of these unions were raised as Muslims and spread the faith among their compatriots and families. In this way, Muslim trading colonies grew from the Swahili coast of East Africa to the Spice Islands of

Indonesia and everywhere in between.9 Further, Islam’s requirement of a common Arabic language facilitated trade between the disparate peoples and cultures who interacted with Muslim traders—

Arabic quickly became the language of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean.

Vasco da Gama may have been surprised to find Muslims on the Swahili coast, but it worked in his favor as one of his men could speak Arabic and thus translate his need for pilotage to the East Indies. The Sultan of Mozambique met with the Portuguese but balked at the paltry gifts they offered—a fortune by Portuguese standards. Thus rebuked in peaceful trade, the

Portuguese turned to force of arms to get their way, kidnapping pilots who knew the coastal seas

9 Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre- Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 116-166; Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 45-46.

9 and bombarding the town as they sailed away. While sailing up the coast, da Gama’s fleet captured several Arab merchantmen, looting their holds for goods and supplies—marking the Portuguese as little more than common pirates to the Indian Ocean merchants. At the port of Mombasa, they received a poor welcome, news of the bombardment of Mozambique having preceded them, but in the city-state of Malindi—which was at war with Mombasa and eager for allies—da Gama received a warmer welcome, supplies, and an expert pilot to guide them to India.10 Once he arrived at Calicut on the Malabar Coast, da Gama was disappointed to find again that the goods he brought for trade were of little value, and he failed to secure a trade agreement with India, but he was able to secure a load of spices worth a fortune in . Ignorant of the monsoon patterns, the Portuguese flotilla nearly faced a harrowing westward journey across the Indian Ocean that exhausted their supplies and killed half the crew. But when Vasco da Gama’s ships returned to Lisbon in 1499, the proceeds from the spices they had acquired were sold for an enormous profit over the cost of the expedition and the Portuguese had gained valuable information about the profitability and vulnerability of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean.

Vasco da Gama’s expedition to India changed the nature of maritime trade systems throughout the world. The Portuguese had already found new sources of slaves and gold on the

Guinea Coast of Africa, and by bypassing the Ottoman and Venetian monopoly of the spice trade via the Levant, the Portuguese shifted the power dynamics away from the Italian city-states to the

Iberian coasts. By bringing Mediterranean-style trade and warfare to the Indian Ocean—whose centuries-old trade systems were poorly equipped to deal with such violence—the Portuguese

10 Nigel Cliff, The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama (New York: Harper, 2011), 207-208.

10 believed they could break the Muslim monopoly on the spice trade.11 And within just over a decade of da Gama’s voyage, the Portuguese did exactly that.

To achieve their desired foothold in the spice trade, the Portuguese realized they needed to secure and fortify only a few key ports in the Indian Ocean, most of which they managed to secure under the governorship of Afonso de Albuquerque between 1509 and 1515. Their first target was a permanent base on the Malabar coast, and in 1510, the Portuguese managed to wrest “Golden

Goa” from the Sultan of Bijapur. But the Portuguese’s greatest asset came with the conquest of

Malacca in 1511. Malacca served as the major distribution center for Indonesian spices, and it overlooked a bottleneck between the Indian Ocean, the Sea, and the South China Sea, giving the Portuguese direct access to nearly all trade between the Far East, including China, and the rest of the world. And in 1515, the Portuguese secured the entryway to the with the conquest of Ormuz. The only major setback was their failure to lock down the Red Sea when their attack on Aden, near the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, failed in 1513.12 Portuguese patrols in the Red

Sea occasionally disrupted the spice trade there, but they could never completely lock it down; yet, their control of Ormuz, Goa, and Malacca allowed the Portuguese to effectively dominate Indian

Ocean trade routes, nearly succeeding in achieving the desired monopoly.

The Portuguese issued special licenses, called cartaz, to Asian merchants who paid the necessary duties and customs; those who did not were liable to have their cargoes seized or sunk if they encountered Portuguese ships. In other words, the Portuguese levied extortion payments for

“protection” on a previously peaceful trade system whose merchants could find no aid in their local rulers. The Portuguese presence in Asia, by the standards of the great land-based empires in China,

11 K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 64-65. 12 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 46-47.

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India, Persia, and Southwest Asia, was extremely minuscule. Had the Mughals or Safavids desired to do so, they could have pushed the Portuguese out of Goa or Ormuz, respectively. But such land- based empires considered “wars by sea [to be] merchant affairs.”13 But the Portuguese could not be matched at sea except by overwhelming numbers, as they discovered when Ming Chinese fleets decisively defeated the Portuguese in 1521 and 1522.14 In short, within a period of sixteen years, the Portuguese went from a relatively weak European kingdom on a backwater continent to arguably the world’s premier maritime power. Their weakness forced them to take risks; they encountered trade networks remarkably ill-prepared to handle Portuguese violence—a violence borne out of a crusader culture rooted in centuries of warfare in the hotly-contested Mediterranean; and they benefitted from the fact that the larger powers in Asia largely ignored their incursion.

Imperial Eurocentrism: Teleological Explanations of Hegemony

In the , the Spanish enjoyed similarly fortuitous circumstances. Indigenous peoples throughout the continent had little or no resistance to European diseases and suffered unimaginable depopulation. Relatively small Spanish armies, with the aid of sympathetic indigenous peoples, conquered the Aztec and Inca Empires and thus inherited mountains full of silver in and . The Iberians set out for fortune, and that is exactly what they found. It is at this point, at the turn of the sixteenth century, that traditional historical narratives begin to take a markedly Eurocentric turn.

Postindustrial Europe in the nineteenth century found itself at the fore of the world stage, dominating world economies and ruling over colonies on every habitable continent. Having come so far in just three centuries—from a hopeless backwater with ambitions of gaining access to Asian

13 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 50. 14 Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 46-50.

12 markets to a hegemony—Europeans sought to examine and explain the reasons why their civilizations came to dominate the modern world, and they wrote their histories from this teleological, Eurocentric perspective.

The principal problem with such Eurocentric perspectives is the distorting effect they have on world affairs between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.

Patrick Manning, one of the founders of the field of World History, describes Eurocentrism as “the idea that history outside ‘the West’ was the story of Westerners away from home, or the history of

Western impact on other areas of the world.”15 This was true for the study of the Portuguese and

Spanish seaborne empires in the sixteenth century, and certainly true for the vast majority of British imperial history. Eurocentric historians were less interested in understanding the nuanced maritime trade systems of the Indian Ocean before 1497, for example, than they were with the Portuguese conquests of Goa, Malacca, and Ormuz and in connecting those conquests to a larger narrative of the inevitability of European dominance—of “proof” of the superiority of their civilization. Such selective analysis allowed Eurocentric historians to change the narrative by reframing their subjects in a teleological perspective. Columbus, in these studies, is not so much a Genovese corsair who mistook the Americas for the East Indies due to miscalculations;16 rather, he is the “discoverer” of the Americas, setting in motion a chain of events that would establish Spain as the preeminent power in Europe, paving the way for even greater empires to follow, all while conveniently ignoring the fact that Europeans continued to orient themselves to Asian markets—and not the other way around—for three-and-a-half centuries after Columbus.

15 Manning, Navigating World History, 101. 16 Pomeranz and Topik, The World That Trade Created, 58-59.

13

Perspectives: ReOrienting the Past through World History

Only relatively recently have historians begun to challenge Eurocentric perspectives. In

1989, Janet L. Abu-Lughod wrote Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 in response to the writings of historians like Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel—both of whom proposed a Eurocentric explanation for the emergence of a global economy after the Spanish and Portuguese voyages of discovery. Abu-Lughod proposed that a global economy did exist, but earlier than Wallerstein or Braudel claimed, and it was certainly not dominated by Europeans. Her primary argument, and one which she argues well, is that “there was no inherent historical necessity that shifted the system to favor the West rather than the East, nor was there any inherent historical necessity that would have prevented cultures in the eastern region from becoming progenitors of a modern world system.”17 Abu-Lughod made an effective case for the need to separate historical ends—in this case, the emergence of a dominant Europe—from teleological perspectives. By arguing that the emergence of European hegemony in the Orient had more to do with European appropriation of pre-existing trade systems at a time when the East was in disarray, Abu-Lughod effectively provided an alternative way of explaining Occidental ascendancy without falling into the trap of European exceptionalism that had snared so many historians before her.

Andre Gunder Frank’s criticism of Eurocentrism was a bit more brazen than Abu-Lughod.

Writing in 1998, he argued that “the ‘world economy and system’ of which Europe was the ‘core’ in the sense of Braudel, Wallerstein, and others including Frank, was itself only a minor and for a long time still quite marginal part of the real world economy as a whole.”18 He unabashedly tore down those arguments proposing European exceptionalism and proposed to replace them with a

17 Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 12. 18 Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 5.

14

Sinocentric perspective. Frank correctly noted that for three hundred years after the Spanish and

Portuguese set out into the Atlantic, contemporary Europeans continued to view Asia as the economic center of the world.19 Maintaining such Asian cynosure is important to understand the contemporary motives of Europeans in the Age of Sail, and this is particularly true of the European pirates. These men, and a few women, and the communities that supported them lived in a nuanced world. Less concerned about the center of economic wealth or the origins of modern systems, pirates crossed boundaries between civilizations and frontiers, navigated trade winds and contemporary politics, and perhaps epitomized the one thing that was exceptional about Europeans in this timeframe: the use of violence as a means of acquiring wealth.

Definitions: Buccaneers, Corsairs, Pirates, and Privateers

Reduced to the simplest definition, pirates were essentially men in boats with guns who robbed their victims, but rarely do such reductions reflect the nuanced realities of any historical subject, and pirates are no exception. A “pirate” was, and still is, a sea robber and therefore a criminal, but other terms used to describe these figures demonstrate the nuanced nature of piracy.

One country’s pirate was another country’s or corsair. Buccaneers, freebooters, raiders, marauders, and rovers have all been labels attached to pirates through the years, and by and large, there is little essential difference aside from the perspective of the one using the term. “Privateers” were armed merchant vessels or crew, licensed to plunder the vessels and goods of hostile countries.

The concept of privateering gave early modern states expanded naval capability without the costs of building and maintaining a large navy by leveraging the modern conceptions of private enterprise. “Corsairs” were, essentially, Mediterranean pirates, who most often worked under older feudal systems for both Muslim and Christian countries—recall that Christopher Columbus had

19 Frank, ReOrient, 11.

15 served as a corsair for the Genovese, raiding Venetian and Muslim shipping. “Buccaneers” were frontiersmen living in the Caribbean and along the South American coast in the seventeenth century. Primarily French, they lived off herds of cattle and pigs introduced by Spanish settlers.

Their name comes from the way in which they prepared the meat over an open barbecue in the fashion of the Arawak Indians—boucanier, meaning to smoke or cure.20 Understanding the nuances of these labels helps students of piracy understand the contextual implications, but it is important to note that these labels were not fixed. A privateer who exceeded or was perceived to have exceeded his —the document issued by a state authority giving him permission to raid specific targets—could easily be labeled a pirate, and acts of piracy could just as easily be justified through the appropriate leverage of state authority. With their geographical and chronological contexts, the terms “corsair” and “buccaneer” are less flexible, but essentially still describe men in boats with guns. All pirates needed three basic things to ply their trade: the threat of violence to overcome their victims and acquire spoils, access to friendly ports of call to maintain their equipment and sell their spoils, and areas with both large volumes of trade and relatively weak policing forces—they needed frontiers.

The Early Modern Era was rife with opportunities for pirates, particularly as the Dutch,

English, French, and others made bids to follow the Iberians in setting out to find their fortunes.

Nearly all European merchant vessels of the time were armed, if not with cannon, then at least with small arms; this provided European pirates with easy access to the means of violence, the first requirement of their trade. Further, the Americas, the African Coast, and the Indian and Pacific

Basins were essentially vast unknown frontiers, each with opportunities for making money. In the

Atlantic alone, far-flung trade networks quickly connected Europe to frontiers in the Americas and

20 Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, xvii-xviii; Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 95.

16 along the African Coast. Caribbean sugar plantations produced a cash crop in growing demand in

Europe, but they needed a continuous supply of provisions and labor. European markets produced manufactured goods that merchants traded for slaves on the African Coast and victuals in American settler colonies, and long lines of sailing vessels plied the trade winds to connect it all.

Communication between parts of the system took weeks, if not months, and military patrols were sporadic in peacetime and practically nonexistent in war—the ships being needed to protect the shores of the European metropoles, leaving the frontiers to fend for themselves. European trading ports in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia faced similar challenges of distance and time.

Settlements, separated as they were by leagues and weeks from supply and support, had to be relatively independent in all things, making their inhabitants relatively willing to deal with unsavory characters to ensure their survival and prosperity. In these frontier zones then, pirates of all sorts found a ready opportunity to ply their trade.

Chasing the Dragon: Sixteenth-Century English Ambitions

As the Spanish and Portuguese established their new seaborne empires and split the world in two with the Treaty of Tordesillas, England dealt with a series of succession crises and the consequences of Henry VIII’s efforts at reformation. The relative stability offered by the ascension of Queen in 1558 allowed the English to begin to set their internal affairs in order and turn an to the wider world. Thanks to the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Spanish and Portuguese claimed monopolies on the trade routes to the East Indies—monopolies they jealously defended.

The English had little hope of being able to compete with either the Portuguese or Spanish directly, so if they were to establish their own trade routes with China—to chase the dragon—they would need to think outside the box.

17

Chapter 2

CARVING OUT AN EMPIRE: FREEBOOTING ON THE FRONTIER

Sic Parvis Magna – Great achievements from small beginnings.21

Queen Elizabeth I succeeded her sister Mary to the English throne in 1558 and inherited a troubling situation. England was a tiny island nation competing for its survival. Recent wars with

France had not gone well for the English, and Mary’s marriage to Philip II, King of Spain and

Portugal, created the strong possibility of invasion of England. The was relatively small compared to its Spanish counterparts, and the English treasury could not hope to compete with the income generated by Spanish American colonies and trade with the Orient—monopolies that the Spanish jealously guarded. Elizabeth needed a way to tap into these revenue streams to build up her military without giving the Spanish justification to invade England before the English were ready to defend themselves, but if she sent her small Royal Navy, war would be all but assured. Private merchants, however, provided the young queen with a potential solution: piracy.

Sir John Hawkins: Smuggling and Innovation in the Atlantic

John Hawkins, the son and heir of a merchant, saw opportunity in the Spanish frontiers and gathered investors for an expedition in 1562. He sailed down the African coast, relieving Portuguese traders of their cargoes, primarily slaves, and then sold his ill-begotten goods to underserved Spanish settlements in the Americas before returning to Plymouth with a hold full of bullion, spices, and sugar, earning a tidy profit.22 It also earned him the attention of the English

21 The of Sir Francis Drake, Lifetimes Gallery at Buckland Abbey, Yelverton, , accessed October 8, 2016, http://www.nationaltrustimages.org.uk/image/169478. 22 Henry Sweetser Burrage, Early English and French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534-1608 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 113.

18 crown because the victims of his trade scheme were entirely the Spanish, and as a private merchant, his actions could be publicly denied, even while they were privately supported, by the crown.

The actions of men like Hawkins could serve as a source of revenue for England while simultaneously weakening Spain. Technically, Hawkins was a pirate—the Spanish certainly came to regard him as such—but Elizabeth was willing to look past that fact as long as his roving served her purposes. In 1564, Elizabeth joined the pool of investors in Hawkins’s second voyage into the

Atlantic, leasing him the seven-hundred-ton carrack, Jesus of Lübeck, in return for a share of his spoils. With a young Francis Drake sailing in his flotilla, Hawkins proceeded to repeat his voyage of 1562. The English privateers sailed down the West African Coast and captured a number of

Portuguese slave ships before crossing the Atlantic to sell their newly-acquired cargo in Venezuela.

John Hawkins knew that Spanish officials in the large towns would not allow him to do business because it went against their interests in maintaining the Spanish monopoly on regional trade, but he also knew that the smaller Spanish towns were underserved and desperate for the goods he acquired, particularly for slaves. By paying a small “tax” to these officials, Hawkins was able to secure a regional commercial license and thus sell most of his cargo, but when he reached Rio de la Hacha, closer to , he found that bribes were no longer sufficient and had to resort to threatening violence to conduct his business.23 Nevertheless, Hawkins was yet again able to unload his cargo and return to England in 1565 having earned substantial profits for his investors.

Hawkins’s successful voyages were a clarion call for English merchants looking to make money in the Atlantic slave, spice, and sugar trades. He “reached England in September, 1565, bringing with him much treasure in gold, silver, and various commodities, and valuable information

23 John Sparke, The Voyage made by M. John Hawkins Esquire, 1565; online facsimile edition at www.americanjourneys.org/aj-030, accessed September 30, 2016.

19 concerning that part of the New World which he had visited.”24 It was obvious that while the

Spanish claimed a monopoly, they were not willing to go to the expense and effort required to fully enforce it, allowing men like Hawkins to enter the trade through guile and force and thus reap great rewards. Hawkins had little difficulty organizing investors for a third and larger expedition, but he could not know that this next journey would coincide with the arrival of a large Spanish fleet sent to investigate and put down a potential independence movement in . In 1567, Hawkins set sail from Plymouth with five ships and over five-hundred men under his command.

The voyage did not begin well, with a large storm dispersing the fleet within a week of its departure in October, but by January 1568, the English privateers had regrouped, reached the Gold

Coast of Africa, and began raiding for slaves. Unfortunately for the English, no convenient

Portuguese was available to steal on this journey, leaving Hawkins’s men to acquire their slaves by more direct means. They began by raiding coastal villages and those near rivers, but they suffered heavy casualties at the hands of envenomed African arrows. They had managed to capture only 150 potential slaves before they encountered a friendly king with a proposition:

There came to us a negro, sent from a king oppressed by other Kings his neighbours, desiring our aide, with promise that as many Negros as by these warres might be obtained, as well of his part as of ours, should be at our pleasure: whereupon we concluded to give aide, and sent 120 of our men, which the 15 of Januarie, assaulted a towne of the Negros of our Allies adversaries, which had in it 8000 Inhabitants… considering that the good successe of this enterprise might highly further the commoditie of our voyage, I went my selfe, and with the helpe of the king of our side… we tooke 250 persons, men, women, and children.25

Clearly, Hawkins expressed no shame in his slave raiding, viewing the four- or five- hundred “men, women, and children” his men captured through force of arms as nothing more than mere commodities of his enterprise. The privateers’ actions on the Gold Coast demonstrated that

24 Burrage, Early English and French Voyages, 135. 25 John Hawkins, “The Third Voyage by M. John Hawkins, 1567-1568,” in Early English and French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534-1608 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 138.

20 the English were no strangers to armed mercantilism. They were prepared to trade for their commodities, but if they could acquire them by force of arms, that was all the better. Further, it is important to note that Hawkins leveraged the local political situation in Africa to his advantage, working with one group of Africans against another, the English privateers demonstrated the ability to maximize their force away from home by utilizing divisions between foreign peoples to increased effect. On their own, the English only managed to capture 150 slaves at great cost in wounded and dead, but with the aid of locals, they effectively quadrupled their haul and potentially established a willing future trade partner in the bargain.

The English squadron then made its way to the West Indies, where they “coasted from place to place, making our traffike with the Spaniards as we might, somewhat hardly, because the king had straightly commanded all his Governours in those parts, by no meanes to suffer any trade to be made with us.”26 Despite these difficulties, the English were able to trade along the

Venezuelan coast with relative ease until they once again called upon Rio de la Hacha. The English found that the Spanish had fortified the town and that the apparently had designs to seize the English slaves and other cargos once Hawkins’s men had unloaded their goods ashore. Backed by one hundred “Hargabuziers,”27 the governor emerged from the fort and lined up to face

Hawkins’s crew. After an initial volley from the town militia, after which the Spaniards scattered,

Hawkins and his men were able to storm the fortifications and recover their goods. With the violence, Hawkins feared that he would be unable to sell his wares, but he discovered that the volley was nothing more than a show of force to satisfy witnesses that the local government had resisted in compliance with King Philip’s verdict—the governor sent representatives to Hawkins’s docked

26 Hawkins, “The Third Voyage,” 139. 27 Men armed with a type of contemporary firearm, the arquebus.

21 ships under the cover of darkness and “bought of us to the number of 200 Negros.”28 Their trade nearly complete, the English decided to make their way back to England with their profits, hoping to make it out of the Caribbean before hurricane season. They were not so lucky.

On August 12, 1568 the English found themselves caught in two hurricanes off the coast of Florida that caused severe damage to their ships and forced them to seek refuge at San Juan de

Ulúa, a small island on the Mexican Coast near Vera Cruz, to make repairs. This was a precarious position for Hawkins. Along with Havana and Panama City, Vera Cruz served as a major staging area for the in the New World, but Hawkins had no alternative port with his fleet badly damaged and desperately in need of a safe harbor. Mistaking the English ships for anticipated ships from Spain, highly-placed Spanish officials rowed out to the ships and promptly found themselves captives of the English privateers. Hawkins had no intentions of staying long, but he kept two hostages to ensure Spanish cooperation while he made repairs to his ships. The next day,

September 17, he spotted a fleet of “thirteene great shippes, and understanding them to bee the fleete of Spaine, I sent immediately to advertise the Generall of the fleete of my being there, doing him to understand, that before I would suffer them to enter the Port, there should be some order of conditions passe betweene us for our safe being there, and maintenance of peace.”29 The English were trapped by the superior Spanish fleet and had no recourse but to try to either talk or fight their way out of the situation. Desiring to avoid an international incident that was sure to upset Queen

Elizabeth, Hawkins attempted to talk.

The commander of the Spanish fleet, Captain-General Don Francisco Luján, was not sailing to San Juan de Ulúa to deal with English pirates—indeed he did not initially suspect

Hawkins’s squadron as such—he was delivering Don Martín Enríquez to investigate and

28 Hawkins, “The Third Voyage,” 140. 29 Hawkins, “The third Voyage,” 141.

22 put down a potential plot in New Spain to secede from the Spanish realm. The two sides exchanged hostages to ensure the peace and the Spanish fleet entered the harbor alongside the English squadron, at which point the Spanish learned of the English activities as illegal slave traders—from what source is not entirely clear. Viceroy Enríquez went ashore, bound for Mexico City, and with the Viceroy out of danger, Luján made arrangements to deal with the English. Meanwhile,

Hawkins charged his cousin, Francis Drake, with moving the most valuable of the expedition’s cargo—the gold and jewels that could be easily transported—to the Judith and directed him to wait outside the harbor, just in case the situation with the Spanish deteriorated, which is precisely what happened.

On September 23rd, the Spanish launched a coordinated attack against Hawkins’s privateers. Hundreds of soldiers attacked the English ashore and swarmed over their vessels at anchor while the Spanish ships and fort fired upon the remaining ships. The Swallow and Angel fell quickly, the former overrun by Spanish soldiers and the latter sunk after a few salvos. The

Grace of God was so badly damaged that her crew scuttled her before retreating to the Jesus of

Lübeck, which was so badly damaged that Hawkins and most of his surviving crew abandoned the ship and escaped aboard the Minion, later joining Drake and the Judith in flight across the Gulf of

Mexico while leaving hundreds of men and the vast majority of their cargo and spoils behind. In

January 1569, Hawkins, Drake, and only few dozens of their surviving men returned to England aboard the two surviving ships.30 After two successful and profitable voyages of stealing from the

Portuguese on one side of the Atlantic and selling these stolen goods to the Spanish on the other, the English learned a hard lesson. If they wanted to trade in the West Indies, “they would have to fight for the right under one guise or another, and the wealth of the Indies could be won only by

30 Hawkins, “The Third Voyage,” 147.

23 hard endeavor on the high seas.”31 The potential for trade in the Atlantic was still quite profitable, but it was clear that the English had to be more than simply clever; they had to be prepared to fight.

John Hawkins demonstrated that England could work its way into the Atlantic trade networks by dealing with neglected Spanish settlements, but the devastation of his third voyage reminded the English that they had a long way to go before they could threaten the Spanish directly.

Hawkins never led another voyage into the Atlantic. He took up a position in Parliament in 1571 and received an appointment as the Treasurer of the Royal Navy in 1578, where he took a keen interest in ship construction and rigging, implementing innovations in the Royal Navy that made their ships faster, more durable in tropical seas, and more adaptable to bad weather. He was later knighted for his efforts against the , but he would leave the privateering life to his cousin, Francis Drake, who would become one of the most famous privateers of all time.

Figure 2: A Map of the West Indies. Herman Moll, A Map of the West Indies &c. Mexico or New Spain, London, 1732. Source: Geographicus. Digital Image. Modified to highlight locations mentioned within text.

31 D. W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 120.

24

Sir Francis Drake: Piracy and a Voyage `Round the World

Sea rovers like John Hawkins, for all their perceived success in England, made little true impact on Spanish operations in the New World—raiding and selling a few hundred slaves a year paled in comparison to the vast quantities of gold and silver produced by New World mines. Twice a year, fleets of Spanish would gather at Nombre de Dios on the to carry this valuable bullion and other goods back to Spain. As long as this supply of bullion continued to flow, Spain could largely ignore the actions of men like John Hawkins. With dozens of ships sailing together in mighty convoys across the Atlantic, none could challenge the Spanish on the high seas. But Francis Drake was about to demonstrate that an entrepreneurial Englishman, with the proper application of firepower and guile, was something to be feared, for he could find and exploit the weak spots in Spain’s system.

Nombre de Dios was not a great city like Vera Cruz, Panama, or Cartagena. No fort overlooked its harbor—only a small earthwork battery of six guns—and it contained no fine buildings. It was a malarial swamp, covered in shacks and sheds crouched along the waterfront on the edge of a jungle, and it was only fully occupied whenever the treasure fleets were in harbor, its buildings being for the most part abandoned the rest of the year.32 In 1571, Francis Drake paid a reconnaissance visit to Nombre de Dios, disguised as a Spanish merchant. He noted the condition of the harbor and location of the treasure-house that stored valuables that arrived by mule train from Panama’s Pacific Coast, where a network of ships transported New World bullion and goods from Manilla—captured by the Spanish in 1564 and serving as an entrepôt for Spanish trade in the

East Indies—intended for the treasure fleets. Drake noted a sheltered cove up the coast that could provide safe anchorage for a future expedition and contacted escaped black slaves, called

32 Kenneth Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder 1530-1630 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 19.

25

Cimaroons, who were more than willing to work against their former Spanish masters.33 Drake returned to England in 1571 with plans to outfit an expedition that would strike at the heart of the

Spanish enterprise in the New World.

Francis Drake was a commoner. The eldest son of a preacher who ministered to the Royal

Navy, he took to the sea at a young age and quickly developed a knack for the work. Having such helpful familial connections to John Hawkins certainly gave Drake a leg-up, but it is still remarkable that by his mid-twenties, Hawkins trusted Drake with command of a ship on the former’s final voyage into the West Indies. In 1572, after gathering intelligence about the Spanish operations at Nombre de Dios, Drake set sail from Plymouth in command of his own flotilla. He had two small ships, the Pashca and the Swan, and seventy-three men under his command.34 This force was only a fraction of that commanded by Hawkins in 1567-69, but Drake did not intend to merely continue Hawkins’s work as an illegal slave trader, and a smaller force was more likely to escape notice.

Drake’s force arrived in July of 1572 and made anchor in the sheltered cove he had discovered on his voyage of the previous year. Crossing overland towards Nombre de Dios in the night, Drake’s men silenced the town’s guns and prepared to attack the town. Drake split his force in two. His brother John commanded a diversionary force that was intended to draw the town’s defenders to the west while Francis and his men attacked from the east. Initially, the attack worked precisely according to plan, but then Drake took a bullet to the thigh and a thunderstorm struck the town, making the English weapons ineffective due to wet powder, but Drake’s men managed to capture the treasure house, regardless. When they opened the doors, however, their hopes and

33 Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, 26-27. 34 Hans P. Kraus, “Drake’s First Success: Panama, 1572-1573” in Sir Francis Drake: A Pictorial Biography, last modified August 31, 2010, http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/catalog/drake/drake-3- firstsuc.html.

26 efforts were dashed. The storerooms were empty. With their captain bleeding profusely, Drake’s men returned to their ships, emptyhanded.35 The initial expedition had failed, but Drake had no intentions to return to England emptyhanded.

Drake and his men remained in the area, spending weeks and months scouting for new opportunities and raiding Spanish settlements for their necessities. They also scouted the overland routes utilized by Spanish mule trains, and it was on one such venture that Drake first laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean. Drake and his men continued until they spied Panama City and witnessed the arrival of Spanish treasure ships from Peru. In March of 1573, Drake and his Cimaroon allies joined forces with a French buccaneer by the name of Captain Guillaume le Testu to ambush the mule trains carrying bullion from Panama City to Nombre de Dios. The pirates—for pirates they were, as Drake was operating entirely outside of any official sanction—successfully pounced on the mule trains, killing or driving off its guards and finding that each of the 190 mules captured carried about 300 pounds of silver bullion and gold coins. The total haul, worth approximately

£100,000, was too much for the English to carry to their ships, and the mules would be useless in the jungle. Drake ordered his men to bury what they could not carry and made a hasty break for his ships with the rest. Nevertheless, he and his men managed to secure, and successfully return to

England, a haul worth approximately £20,000 in silver bars and gold coins.36 Drake’s daring raid on the Spanish treasure caravan signaled a shift in English piracy against the Spanish. With a relatively small force, including unlikely allies, Francis Drake struck at the very heart of Spanish wealth in the New World. And he did it not by trading with desperate frontier towns, but by

35 Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, 26-28; Other accounts of Drake’s raid can be found in: Kenneth Andrews, Drake’s Voyages (London: Harper Collins, 1970); Neville Williams, Francis Drake (London: Widenfeld & Nicholson, 1973); and Neville Williams, The : Privateers, Plunder and Piracy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Smithmark, 1975). 36 Kraus, “Drake’s First Success.”

27 executing a direct raid, deep in Spanish territory, where the Spaniards believed themselves secure.

Drake’s success drew the attention of Queen Elizabeth, just as John Hawkins’s success had done so a decade earlier, and in 1577, Drake set out to redefine the boundaries of English piracy once again.

Drake’s exploits in Panama earned him the support of several English investors, including

Sir , one of England’s wealthiest nobles, as well as Queen Elizabeth. Drake assembled a squadron of five ships—the flagship , Christopher, Elizabeth, Marigold, and

Swan—along with 164 men, intending to strike at the Spanish-held Pacific coasts of the Americas and seek the elusive that would allow England to bypass the Spanish and reach the East Indies directly. Their true mission was to be held in the highest secrecy—Elizabeth still unwilling to risk open war with Spain—with the public destination announced as Alexandria. On

November 15, 1577, Drake’s fleet departed Plymouth and made their way south to the

Islands off the African coast. Ever the opportunist, Drake captured a Portuguese ship, the Santa

Maria, rechristened her the Mary, and kept her pilot, Nuno da Silva, who was familiar with the route from the Atlantic to the Pacific around . Thus, with six vessels and a kidnapped pilot, Drake’s fleet crossed the Atlantic and sailed down the coast of South America for the Cape

Horn crossing. Storms and worms—a type of wood-eating pest present in tropical waters that can quickly ruin a ship’s hull—took their toll on Drake’s fleet during the crossing. He was forced to scuttle both the Swan and the Christopher during the crossing, and the Mary shortly after arriving in San Julian on the Argentine coast, and heavy storms near Cape Horn forced the Elizabeth to turn back for England and sunk the Marigold with all hands. Drake’s fleet now consisted solely of the

Pelican—which he rechristened the in honor of Sir Christopher Hatton’s coat of arms—but Drake once again demonstrated tenacity in the face of unexpected hardship and pressed

28 on into the Pacific.37 His crew were the first Englishmen to sail the Pacific Ocean, and they soon found easy spoils to compensate for a rough Atlantic crossing.

Spanish settlements on the Pacific Coast of South America were accustomed to conflict with indigenous peoples, but not at all prepared for the potential of pirate raids. Drake and his men, occasionally with the aid of indigenous peoples, plundered the Chilean coast at will, encountering little resistance. Drake’s men took several small prizes, and by February of 1579 they had accumulated valued near the worth of Drake’s spoils from Panama a few years earlier, which, when combined with the valuable intelligence gathered, made the expedition a relative success despite its losses. But in March of 1579, Drake and his men came upon the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, a Spanish treasure ship en route from to Panama with a hold full of gold and silver bullion.

Figure 3: Drake in the Pacific. John June, Sir Francis Drake engaging the 'Cacafuego', a rich Spanish ship, , Greenwich, England, ca .

37 Francis Pretty, Sir Francis Drake’s Famous Voyage Round the World, accessed October 3, 2016, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2991/2991-h/2991-h.htm.

29

The Nuestra was so heavily armed that she had acquired the nickname Cacafuego, which literally means “Shitfire.”38 Drake knew that he would not be able to take the Cacafuego by force with only one ship—some subterfuge would be required. Drake decided to use a tactic long employed by pirates in disguising the Golden Hind as a slow, innocuous merchantman. He let out all the sail, but ordered that cables, mattresses, and heavy pots be towed behind the ship to give it the appearance of a fully-loaded hold. His ruse worked, as the Cacafuego’s captain allowed Drake to pull up within hailing distance. After a short exchange in which Drake demanded the Spanish surrender and the Spanish expressed their disinclination to acquiesce to his request, the Golden

Hind opened up with a broadside of cannon and small arms fire. The first salvo shattered the

Cacafuego’s mizzenmast, essentially leaving the larger Spanish vessel dead in the water and allowing Drake’s crew to board the treasure ship before the Spanish could bring their guns to bear.39

Within minutes, Drake’s men captured one of the richest prizes ever taken on the high seas.

It took Drake’s men six days to record and transfer the Cacafuego’s treasures to the Golden

Hind, which included “a great quantity of jewels and precious stones. 13 chests of royals of plate,

80 lb of gold, and 26 tons of uncoined silver.”40 Drake supplied his Spanish captives with letters of safe conduct and gifts according to their station, and he put them ashore—a generous gesture to a beaten opponent, but it did little to lessen he rage and alarm of Spanish authorities when they learned about Drake’s latest robberies. Spanish ships set out to hunt the Golden Hind, but Drake wisely knew to avoid risking further raids. He also knew that returning to England via the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn would likely be watched by Spanish, and so Drake resolved to a different course.

38 Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, 29. 39 Petty, Sir Francis Drake’s Famous Voyage Round the World. 40 Williams, The Sea Dogs, 90.

30

Drake sailed north at first, well beyond the lands noted on his captured Spanish navigational charts, charting the Pacific Coast as he went. Perhaps he was looking for the fabled

Northwest Passage and a shorter route home, but shifting winds and cold weather forced him to quit this course and set out across the Pacific, following the Spanish route to the East Indies. They crossed the Pacific in a span of two months and made their first sight of land in September, nearing one of the thousands of islands in the , but their reception was less than friendly.

Hundreds of canoes set out from the island to entreat with the ship:

The first sort and company of those canowes being come to our ship (which then, by reason of a scant wind, made little way), very subtilly and against their natures, began in peace to traffique with us, giving us one thing for another very orderly, intending (as we perceived) hereby to worke a greater mischief to us: intreating us by signes most earnestly to draw nearer towards the shore, that they might (if possible) make the easier prey both of the ship and us.41

Drake may have encountered one of the oldest pirate traditions in the world, the indigenous peoples of the Sulu Zone engaged in a form of piracy and slave raiding between rival groups since at least the fifth century, often in flotillas of canoes just as Drake described. For many of these peoples, raiding was a way of life, a respectable profession, and a way for warriors and chiefs to increase their power and prestige. In this area of the world, piracy could even have been a type of trade based on theft rather than exchange.42 Recognizing the natives’ intent, Drake scattered the canoes with a few cannon blasts and sailed off to find a different landing.

By November 1579, the Golden Hind reached the Moluccas, the infamous Spice Islands located between New Guinea and , where they encountered the Sultan of , who sent emissaries out to Drake’s vessel, imploring the English to work with him against his rivals in

Tidore and the Portuguese, who he regarded as his enemy. Drake’s men noted the wealth of Ternate,

41 M. N. Penzer, ed., The World Encompassed and Analogous Contemporary Documents Concerning Sir Francis Drake’s of the World (London: Argonaut Press, 1926), 64-65. 42 Robert J. Antony, Pirates in the Age of Sail (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 44-46.

31 whose officials wore the “white lawn of cloth of Calicut”—demonstrating again the trade networks between India and Indonesia.43 Drake took on provisions and spices, but knew that he could not tarry long for fear of being discovered by the Portuguese vessels that plied these waters and claimed a monopoly. To avoid them, Drake sailed south, along the southern coasts of the to avoid the Portuguese trade routes, particularly their fortress at Malacca, before cutting across the Indian

Ocean for the Cape of Good Hope, which they passed in June.

On November 3, 1580, Francis Drake and the surviving crew of the Golden Hind sailed into Plymouth, becoming the first Englishmen to circumnavigate the globe. Cognizant of the implications of his voyage, Drake sent word to Queen Elizabeth, who summoned him to an audience. King Philip of Spain had recently added Portugal to his growing empire, making the

Spanish monarch an incredibly powerful adversary, and many of the Queen’s counselors desired to appease Philip and avoid a potential war by handing Drake and his spoils over to the Spanish.

The Queen had different designs. Elizabeth surmised that war with Spain was likely inevitable and that England’s position would not improve by turning Drake and the contents of the Golden Hind over to Philip. Further, the crown desperately needed the money. Drake’s raid returned an astonishing 4,600 per cent to its investors—an amount large enough that the Queen was able to pay off the crown’s debts with enough left over to capitalize new ventures in the and

East India Companies, whose profits would drive the economic engines of England for centuries.44

With his justified by the crown, Drake became a national hero—a figure to inspire confidence in the England even while he inspired fear in Spain. Further, Elizabeth utilized Drake’s

43 Petty, Sir Francis Drake’s Famous Voyage. 44 Hans P. Kraus, “The Famous Voyage: The Circumnavigation of the World, 1577-1580” in Sir Francis Drake: A Pictorial Biography, last modified August 31, 2010, http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/catalog/drake/drake-4-famousvoy.html; For more information on the Levant Company, see J.C. Stamp “Mr. Keynes’ Treatise on Money” in The Economic Journal 41, no. 162 (1931): 241-49.

32 exploits to secure tighter relationships with France, who had also begun to fear the growing power of the Spanish throne. On April 4, 1581, Queen Elizabeth boarded the Golden Hind to hold a state banquet where she openly defied King Philip of Spain. “‘He hath demanded Drake’s head of me,’ she laughed aloud, ‘and here I have a gilded sword to strike it off.’ With that she bade Drake kneel.

Then, handing the sword to Marchaumont, the special envoy of her French suitor, Francis of Anjou, she ordered him to give the accolade. This done, she pronounced the formula of immemorial fame:

I bid thee rise, Sir Francis Drake!”45 By having Monsieur de Marchaumont do the honors,

Elizabeth gained France’s implicit sanction of Drake’s actions.

The motto Drake incorporated into his coat of arms—sic parvis magna, which translates to

“great achievements from small beginnings”—appears appropriate on many levels.46 Personally,

Drake’s career began as a common sailor on the illicit slave trading voyages of his cousin, John

Hawkins. It then evolved into outright piracy in Panama, which he parlayed into a privateering expedition that subsequently resulted in his knighthood and a high post in the Admiralty. But this motto was also appropriate for England’s imperial and mercantile ambitions. Common sailors provided England with the means to profitable commerce in the Atlantic, and when the Spanish attempted to protect their monopoly through force of arms, common sailors rose to the challenge and began to take Spain’s wealth directly. Drake’s career provided a proof of concept that crown- sponsored privateering expeditions could be immensely profitable, both economically and politically. English rulers did not have to go to the expense of building and maintaining large to be effective against their enemies at sea; they simply had to give royal sanction to

England’s multitudes of armed merchantmen, who had the example of Sir Francis Drake and his

45 William Wood, The Elizabethan Sea Dogs, last modified July 8, 2004, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12855/pg12855-images.hmtl. 46 The coat of arms of Sir Francis Drake, Lifetimes Gallery at Buckland Abbey, Yelverton, Devon, accessed October 8, 2016, http://www.nationaltrustimages.org.uk/image/169478.

33 infamous exploits to inspire them to seek their own fortunes in the frontier zones of the early modern era.

Throughout the sixteenth century, English rovers followed the examples of Hawkins and

Drake, preying upon and trading with Spanish and Portuguese colonies with the implicit support of the crown, and in the seventeenth century, the English began to establish their own settler colonies in the New World: Virginia in 1607, Bermuda in 1612, St. Kitts in 1623, and in

1628. These early colonies were, at best, tenuous situations. Pioneer settlers not only had to establish homesteads and viable crops to support themselves, they also had to deal with the matters of securing protection and trade with little support from England. Thankfully for the settlers, the

Spanish concentrated their efforts on protecting their treasure convoys rather than going to the extra expense to keep the English and others out of the Americas entirely. But the ever-shifting political situation in Europe between the English, Dutch, French, and Spanish, and the sheer distance between the colonies and the home islands forced the settlers to quickly develop contacts with unsavory characters in order to survive. Pirates and smugglers were invaluable trade resources for these frontier colonies as well as a potential source of protection. In return, the pirates found friendly ports in which to fence their stolen goods.

The early-seventeenth century also witnessed the first voyages of the British East India

Company, which was founded on December 31, 1600, with Queen Elizabeth granting a “Charter of incorporation of the East India Company by the name of the Governor and Company of

Merchants of London trading into the East Indies. ‘A privilege for fifteen years granted by Her

Majesty to certain adventurers for the discovery of the trade for the East Indies.’”47 Initially, the

47 “Charter of incorporation of the East India Company by the name of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies”, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies, China and , Volume 2, 1513-1616, ed. W Noel Sainsbury (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1864), 113-118.

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English struggled to secure profitable trade due to their ignorance of the Indian trade systems and to competition with the Portuguese, who continued to enforce their monopoly through force of arms. But the company began to arm its merchantmen in the manner of privateers and passed along correspondence detailing Portuguese and Dutch activities in the area, as well as local conditions.48

Following the Battle of Swally in 1612, in which East India Company ships defeated a number of

Portuguese vessels attempting to prevent the English from contacting the Mughal governor of

Surat, the company managed to break the Portuguese monopoly on trade with the Mughals and thus laid the foundations for an increasingly profitable trade between England and India. English investors began to use American colonial profits from the triangular trade in the Atlantic to fund more expensive, but much more profitable, expeditions in Asia, but this would only be possible as long as the English managed to secure permanent and reliable Atlantic trade networks.

Sir Henry Morgan: Buccaneer Soldier and Pragmatic Piracy

A new type of pirate developed in the seventeenth-century Caribbean frontier: the buccaneer. Consisting primarily of French frontiersmen driven out of the highlands of Hispanola, where they survived off wild cattle and pigs and earned their name for the method in which they prepared their meat, the buccaneers of the Caribbean soon began to consist of motely crews of runaway slaves, deserters, escaped criminals, shipwreck survivors, and religious refugees. Sticking to the coasts and utilizing canoes, the buccaneers lured passing ships close to the shore with signal fires before swarming the decks. Such pirates were a natural side-effect of the frontier zones of the

Caribbean. More interested in personal gain than in the interests of a given nation, they represented

48 Captain Thomas Best et al., “Captain T. Best, Wm. More and H. Gyttins, [merchants of the Dragon and Osiander], to Thos. Aldworthe, at ,” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies, China and Japan, Volume 2, 1513-1616, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1864), 253-254.

35 a threat to all nations trading in the Caribbean, including, potentially, the English. But English merchants soon found beneficial ways to employ these pirates in mutually-beneficial relationships.

The Buccaneers operated according to the seasons, pillaging at sea when the trade winds allowed and retreating to the Bays of Honduras and to cut logwood the rest of the year.

Logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum) was an important commodity in English textiles, fetching prices of £100 per ton, and its production “demonstrates the protoindustrial productive capacity of pirates when they were not pillaging at sea... In addition, because the logwood cutters relied on collaborative efforts with the local indigenous populations, their settlements demonstrate how pirates served as important cross-cultural brokers in the early modern world.”49 English merchants provided the buccaneers with a market through which to liquidate their spoils as well as to provide the supplies necessary to continue their operations. In return, the buccaneers focused their raiding on the Spanish, which also favored English designs.

The nearly continuous state of war between the European powers ensured the need for skilled sailors while simultaneously leaving the frontiers relatively undefended—the military fleets, for the most part, being relegated to defense of the homelands, with one notable exception being the 1654 expedition of General Venables and Admiral Penn with the aim of capturing and eventually wresting the entire Caribbean from the Spanish.50 While the expedition failed to oust the Spanish from Hispaniola, it succeeded in securing as a permanent English colony.

From 1655 onwards, would serve as the primary English anchorage in the Caribbean, which meant that the English had to defend it as well. Sizeable Spanish forces tried to retake the island in 1657 and again in 1658. Even after the war ended in 1660, the Spanish refused to

49 Kevin P. McDonald, Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo- Atlantic World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 22-23. 50 Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, 44-45; It is worth noting that Admiral William Penn was the father of the William Penn responsible for the founding of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

36 recognize English sovereignty on the island, leaving its early in a state of perpetual fear of invasion. Further, the Spanish guardas costas (coast guard) made trade difficult for Jamaica’s

English merchants and sailors, seizing any vessel containing so much as a single Spanish coin— the general currency of the Caribbean in those days—as “smugglers.”51 The early English governors needed to find ways to defend their island colony and its commerce from Spanish privations as well as from bands of roving buccaneers. To deal with these threats, Governor Sir

Thomas Modyford came up with a novel solution: direct the buccaneers against the Spanish.

The ascension of King Charles II to the throne of England in 1660 marked the end of the

Anglo-Spanish War, but not the end of fighting in the Caribbean. Governor Modyford and his peers continued to commission privateers to raid Spanish settlements and shipping. Worried that this practice would renew hostilities between Spain and England, Charles issued orders to his governors to cease their issuance of letters of marque against the Spanish now that peace had been restored. Noting that Spain yet refused to acknowledge English possession of Jamaica, and with significant personal investments to lose should the Spanish regain control, Governor Modyford responded to London that he would comply with the request even while he continued to hire buccaneers:

Sir Thos. Modyford to Col. Morgan. Has advised the ablest planters of Jamaica of his coming with a considerable number of freemen and labourers, and has desired them to repair to the several ports to hire them, whereby the disorders and ruin which have happened to former passengers will be prevented. Therefore desires him to put into Port Morant, Lygonee, Point Cagway, and other ports, to give opportunity of making contracts with the inhabitants.52

51 Colin Woodard, The : Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2015), 86. 52 Sir Thomas Modyford, “Sir Thos. Modyford to Col. Morgan” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 5, 1661-1668, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), 205-212.

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By continuing to employ the buccaneers, Modyford hoped to direct them away from English shipping by giving them some other purpose. He also wrote overtures to the Spanish at San

Domingo, informing them of the King’s decision and his compliance with the same. Modyford’s correspondence implies that the men he directed Morgan to hire were to be employed as merchants and laborers, which sounds innocent enough, but the correspondence of Lieutenant Colonel

Thomas Lynch—one of Modyford’s officers on Jamaica—lays out the situation plainly:

The Swallow and Westergate went to San Domingo, where Col. Cary, C. Hemlock, and J. Perrot obtained a favourable answer to Sir Thos. Modyford’s overtures of peace, but it is improbably that Jamaica will be advantaged by it, for it is not in the power of the Governor to have or suffer a commerce, nor will any necessity or advantage bring private Spaniards to Jamaica, for we and they have used too many mutual barbarisms to have a sudden correspondence…. The calling in the privateers will be but a remote and hazardous expedient, and can never be effectually done without five or six men-of-war. If the Governor commands and promises a cessation and it be not entirely complied with, his and the English faith will be questioned and the design of trade further undone by it. Naked orders to retrain or call them in will teach them only to keep out of this port, and force them (it may be) to prey on us as well as the Spaniards. What compliance can be expected from men so desperate and numerous, that have no other element but the sea, nor trade but privateering.53

Governor Modyford played the political game as well he could, attempting to convince

King James and the Spanish that he would not support privateering. But practical realities in the

Caribbean forced him to find some employment for the buccaneers, so he directed Henry Morgan to continue hiring these men, but as “laborers and merchants” rather than as “privateers.”

Regardless of their label, these men were still buccaneers, and Henry Morgan was their leader.

Henry Morgan was a colorful figure and brilliant military tactician. He took to the family profession of soldiering, claiming to have been “more used to the pike than the book.”54 He took

53 Thomas Lynch, “Lt. Col. Thos. Lynch to Sec. Henry Bennet” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 5, 1661-1668, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1880), 205-212. 54 Dudley Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way: The Biography of Sir Henry Morgan 1635-1684 (London: House of Stratus, 1977), 65.

38 part in the 1655 invasion of Jamaica and served on privateer raiding expeditions against the Spanish over the next few years. When the Spanish captured and executed Edward Mansfield, the de facto leader of the Caribbean buccaneers, Morgan, at age thirty-two, became Mansfield’s successor. He cut a fine figure, dressed in the richest finery, and used his gaudy image to gather the most daring buccaneer bands to his cause with a display of wealth. Captain Morgan, with the backing of

Governor Modyford, used these buccaneers to raid Spanish strongholds throughout the Caribbean and keep the Spanish on a defensive footing, preventing the Spaniards from mounting another invasion of the English colonies while simultaneously employing the buccaneers and lining the pockets of Morgan and Modyford. His most notable achievements were the successful capture and ransom of Porto Bello in 1668 and the sacking of Panama in 1671, where Morgan led fleets with dozens of ships and thousands of men.

Morgan’s raids were the most daring acts of piracy since Drake’s adventures decades earlier, but it is important to note that his motivations differed from those of Drake. Both men believed they were serving the interests of England, but while Drake worked under the direct approval of the crown and sought to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, Morgan often acted in direct opposition to the crown’s will and allowed his men to kill, torture, and rape their way across the

Caribbean without remorse. Yet while Morgan prowled the Caribbean at the head of buccaneer fleets, Jamaica and the rest of the English Caribbean remained relatively secure from both the

Spanish and unruly pirates. Despite the embarrassments his actions caused the crown, King Charles

II knighted Sir Henry Morgan in 1674 and appointed him Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica.55 While

Drake was a privateer in the traditional sense, setting sail into the frontiers for the benefit of the metropolis, Morgan was much more of a buccaneer, content to stay within the context of the frontier

55 Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, 42-55.

39 zones, which allowed him a great deal of freedom. Henry Morgan and his men fought for and protected Jamaica at the governor’s behest and in return, they found a welcome port in which to sell their spoils and spend their coin until it ran out, necessitating another expedition, which the

Governor was willing to commission. By forcing the Spanish into a reactive and defensive posture, and by giving the numerous buccaneers a purpose, Henry Morgan effectively insulated Jamaica from attack and served an important purpose in securing England’s early imperial gains. and Jamaica became the centers of English sugar production in the 1670s, a cornerstone of the triangular trade in the Atlantic that supplied England’s coffers with coin and allowed its businessmen to develop the capital necessary for more attractive ventures.56

The East India Company: Corporate Raiding in the Orient

Despite the focus to this point on the Caribbean, English investors in the seventeenth century were not as concerned with the Americas as they were with the East Indies. Europe had gained considerable ground since Vasco da Gama’s gifts failed to impress the Sultan of

Mozambique, but they were still far from hegemonic. The Portuguese spent the sixteenth century securing trade routes and fortified harbors throughout the Indian Ocean in an attempt to secure a monopoly on the immensely profitable East Indies trade, but these precautions failed to dissuade

Portugal’s European competitors. The Dutch Republic had been fighting against Spain since 1568, and with the Spanish acquisition of Portugal in 1581, they were also at war with the Portuguese.

Thankfully for the Dutch, they had an ally in England, and with the English defeat of the Spanish

Armada in 1588, the Spanish Empire’s maritime empire was potentially vulnerable to predation.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, both the English and Dutch established trading companies to explore the possibility for trade in the East Indies—the English East India Company

56 Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 82-83.

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(EIC) in 1600, and the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC). These companies received their government’s sanction to pursue trade by any profitable means and to oversee their business in the Indian Ocean as pseudo-states, operating relatively independent from the metropoles in London and Amsterdam, respectively. Such sanction essentially amounted to a letter of marque writ large, and the companies soon took advantage of it. The East India Companies muscled their way into Indian Ocean trade just as the Portuguese had done a century earlier: with violence and by leveraging local divisions to their benefit. The VOC captured the Portuguese fortress at

Amboina in 1605, securing the first stronghold from which the Dutch would eventually come to dominate the spice trade, and the EIC supported Persian efforts to ouster the Portuguese from

Hormuz, securing exclusive rights to trade with the Persians in the process.57

Indeed, the European powers had come a long way in securing a foothold in the East Indies trade, reaping enormous profits in the process, but they were not yet hegemonic. Where they traded with the great Asian empires, they did so on Asian terms, often limited to a handful of trading outposts on the periphery of India, China, and Japan. And where they did not have to deal with a great Asian power, they often had to contend with each other. Such was the case at Amboina, in the Spice Islands. The Dutch and English remained allies in common cause against the Spanish and Portuguese with the Republic and English Crown working together in Europe and initially in

Asia. But once their respective companies established themselves in the East Indies, agents of both sought to maximize their profits at the other’s expense, often leading to outright conflicts. Fearing that such conflicts would undermine the alliance in Europe, the Dutch States General and King

James I ordered their respective companies to work cooperatively in the East Indies, sharing trading posts peacefully under the oversight of a joint Council of Defense, but relations remained tense.

57 Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, 80-85.

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Figure 4: A Map of the Spice Islands. Nicolas Sanson, “De Molukkische Eilanden, Celebes, Gilolo, enz.” From Geographische en historiche beschryving der vier bekende werelds-deelen, Utrecht, 1600-1667.

In 1622, the Sultan of Ternate—who had been trading with the VOC at Amboina—began trading with the Spanish out of Manilla as well. The Dutch viewed this as a violation of their monopoly, and they blamed the English, who had failed to supply the warships necessary to keep the Spanish away from Ternate. The VOC’s officers suspected local EIC agents of working with the Ternatanes and others to undermine the VOC’s position and take over the castle at Amboina:

By this means the Governor and Council of Amboyna were moved to have special regard and look narrowly unto all things, seeing that it might be thence clearly gathered that something might be plotted against the State in Amboyna, and that the Indians (of themselves) durst not offer to undertake any such great design without some great help of some of Europe either of Spaniards, Portugals, or some others, and also they understood that they of Loho, Cambello, &c., had great secret correspondence with the English merchants…. Hereupon it came to pass that all the Japonian [Japanese] soldiers which were in our service were disarmed and imprisoned, and by examination of them all it appeared plainly by an orderly and joint confession that all the said Japonians upon the entreaty of Gabriel Towerson and other English merchants and officers agreed to assist the said English to betray the castle and give it over into the English power.58

58 A Pamphlet, printed in Dutch, concerning the conspiracy in the island of Amboyna, in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies, China and Japan, Volume 4, 1622-1624, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1878), 338-357.

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The VOC governor arrested the English officers and their suspected Japanese conspirators—a collection of Ronin, who had contracted with the Dutch to defend Amboina—tortured them to procure confessions, and summarily executed them for treason.59 When the English found out about the incident, they were outraged over the summary execution of English subjects by the VOC. The

Dutch agreed to pay reparations and maintained their alliance with England in Europe, but it was clear that the VOC intended to establish a monopoly on the spice trade in the East Indies that did not include the East India Company. The English and Dutch companies utilized violence and local divisions to benefit their positions in the East Indies. It was only a matter of time before European pirates realized they could do the same.

William Dampier: Buccaneer, Explorer, Imperial Muse

In 1669, just after Henry Morgan returned from his notorious raid on Porto Bello, a young sailor named William Dampier set sail on the John and Martha bound for Java and gained his first experience in navigating the world’s oceans. A common sailor “employed before the mast,” Dampier’s career would significantly shape the course of the British Empire in the early modern era, perhaps more than any other pirate. William Dampier was first and foremost a man with an insatiable curiosity, and he took to piracy primarily to satisfy that curiosity. Throughout his career on the seas, he recorded observations of plants, animals, cultures, events, and perhaps most importantly, the winds and tides. Largely unappreciated in his own time, William Dampier’s reputation has grown in the three centuries hence. He kept a series of journals and wrote books about his travels, which gained him the attention of the Royal Society, and his A Discourse of Winds

“was praised by [Captain James] Cook and [Admiral Horatio] Nelson and is now viewed as a classic exposition of the system of winds, tides and currents in the Southern Hemisphere.” John Cawte

59 The tortures the English survivors describe having been inflicted by the Dutch include waterboarding.

43

Beaglehole, a historian who focused on the works of Captain , noted that

Dampier, “as a continual investigator of hydrography and of the variation of the compass, of winds and the many minutiae of navigation, he is fundamental to all future discovery.”60 With archipelagos, straits, and Royal Navy vessels named after him today, Dampier has been appreciated by modern observers, but it is important to remember how Dampier acquired his navigational expertise: by plying the winds of the world as a buccaneer and privateer, seeking his fortune while also satiating his curiosity.

William Dampier’s early days included sailing to Java with the East India Company and serving in the Anglo-Dutch Wars with the Royal Navy. He parlayed these skills to employment managing a Jamaican sugar plantation but found the work undesirable and soon took up with sailing with the buccaneers and cutting logwood and raiding Spanish ships and settlements.61 In 1685,

Dampier joined Captain Swan aboard the Cygnet, who intended to use his privateering commission to raid Spanish shipping on the Pacific Coast of the Americas before sailing on to the East Indies, which Dampier noted “was a way very agreeable to my inclination… more to indulge my curiosity than to get wealth.”62 Dampier served as the navigator for the voyage to the Philippines, where

Captain Swan promised his men they would take a Manilla , which persuaded the buccaneers to agree to his plan despite their relatively poor provisions. After a voyage of fifty-one days on strict rations, the buccaneers spotted the island of on May 20, 1686. Dampier noted in his journal:

It was well for Captain Swan that we got sight of it before our provision was spent, of which we had but enough for three days more; for, as I was afterwards informed, the men had contrived, first to kill Captain Swan and eat him when the victuals

60 J. C. Beaglehole, The Exploration of the Pacific, 3rd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); William Dampier and Gerald Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer: William Dampier’s Voyages, New. Ed. First Person Singular (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), xvii. 61 Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, 84-85. 62 Dampier and Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer, 69.

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were gone, and after him all of us who were accessory in promoting the undertaking of this voyage. This made Captain Swan say to me after our arrival at Guam, ‘Ah! Dampier, you would have made them but a poor meal’; for I was lean as the captain was lusty and fleshy.63

After restocking provisions in Guam, the buccaneers sailed to the island of in the Philippines, the general rumor being that the sultan there was at war with the Spaniards and would thus license the plunder of Spanish ships around Manilla. When the buccaneers landed at

Cotabato on July 18, they discovered that the rumors of war with Spain were false, but they found the sultan to be a willing host to the heavily armed pirate crew, whom he hoped to persuade to stay and thus protect him from the Dutch.

Figure 5: A Map of the East Indies. William Guthrie, East Indies from the Best Authorities, London: Charles Dilly and G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1790. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. Modified to highlight locations mentioned within the text.

Over the next six months, Captain Swan and the majority of the buccaneers gave themselves over to the pleasures of the sultan’s ceaseless feasts and dancing girls. Dampier was one of the exceptions, taking the time to learn Malayan and record as much as he could about the

63 Dampier and Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer, 76.

45 island and its people. By January 1687, however, most of the buccaneers were short of money, tired of lingering in Mindanao, and itching to go raiding again. When Swan deferred, Dampier and about ninety buccaneers elected a new captain, took the Cygnet, and abandoned Captain Swan and thirty-six of their fellow crew on the island.64 Along with their captain and fellows, the buccaneers abandoned any pretense of operating as privateers. They became common pirates, preying on anything that crossed their paths. Over the next year and a half, the buccaneers explored the coasts of Cochinchina (modern Vietnam) and the Chinese coast near Portuguese Macau, sailed through the Spice Islands, landed on the north shore of (modern ), and raided along the Sumatran coast. All the while Dampier studiously recorded his observations and preserved his notes in a hollowed-out piece of bamboo sealed with wax.

Dampier soon recognized that the venture had taken a dangerous turn. Without a reliable and friendly port of call, the pirates’ luck was very likely to run out sooner or later. With the support of a few others, including the ship’s surgeon, William Dampier convinced the pirate crew to leave him on the Nicobar Islands, where the marooned men would have a hard time warning the

English or Dutch of the pirates’ presence until the latter were well away. Unfortunately for the surgeon, the crew refused to part with his skills, but they allowed Dampier and three others to put ashore. 65 Thus marooned, Dampier and his companions traded with the island’s natives to acquire a canoe in which they successfully navigated their way to , though not without struggle as two men died in the crossing.

Dampier spent the next several months sailing with various merchantmen conducting business in Southeast Asia from Tonkin to the Spice Islands and Malacca. In 1689, Dampier participated in the nascent drug smuggling trade when he sailed as a mate aboard a merchantman

64 Dampier and Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer, 84-105. 65 Dampier and Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer, 128-129.

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“bound for Melaka with a cargo of ‘three or four hundred pound’ of contraband opium.”66 He took a position as the chief gunner and engineer at the English fort in Bengkulu in southern where he acquired a “marvelously decorated” tattooed Filipino slave called Prince Jeoly. Growing dissatisfied with his time at Bengkulu, Dampier and Jeoly took passage back to England, where he arrived in September 1691.

William Dampier had become only the third known Englishman to complete a circumnavigation of the globe—Francis Drake and being the others—and he found himself in London without income or prospects for gainful employment. He made a living by exhibiting Prince Jeoly as a spectacle to curious Londoners while he worked to assemble his notes into a book, but by 1693, Dampier was forced to sell Jeoly and find other work. He heard that a group of wealthy London merchants under Sir James Houblon were assembling a squadron for a privateering mission to the Caribbean and that they were paying well for skilled sailors.

Dampier signed on as second mate of the Dove.67 The squadron, consisting of four heavily-armed warships, was to sail for La Coruña, Spain, where it would receive a privateering commission to raid French vessels and settlements throughout the Caribbean as part of the War of the Grand

Alliance against the forces of Louis XIV. Unfortunately for Dampier and the rest of the privateers, the expedition never sailed beyond La Coruña. The London investors sold the contract for the expedition to the Spanish King Charles II, who decided to hold them in reserve but apparently did not realize that he had to pay the English sailors. A mutiny amongst some of the crew saw the flagship, a forty-gun frigate called Charles II, stolen by Henry Avery. Somewhat surprisingly,

William Dampier did not join the pirates, but returned to England and entered a lawsuit against Sir

James Houblon. Dampier’s first book, A New Voyage Round the World, which was compiled from

66 Dampier and Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer, 184. 67 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 47.

47 his journals and made explicit mention of his piracies, finally went to publication in the spring of

1697. It was a major success, running through four editions in two years and garnering Dampier the attention of the Royal Society, the Council of Trades and Plantations, and the Admiralty.68

The Royal Society was particularly intrigued by Dampier’s prodigious and detailed notes.

The Council of Trades and Plantations and the Admiralty, meanwhile, were interested in the possibility of establishing a colony in Southeast Asia that might do for England what the East Indies were doing for the Dutch. Charles Montagu, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and President of the

Royal Society at the time, recommended that William Dampier be put in charge of a new voyage to the South Seas and to New Holland in particular, to further explore these issues. The Admiralty agreed, and Dampier was given command of the HMS Roebuck to conduct a voyage of exploration in the South Seas in 1698.69

Troubles beset the expedition to New Holland from the very beginning. The Admiralty initially granted Dampier the Jolly Prize, but he claimed it was unfit for the purposes of the expedition and only with great difficulty was he able to secure the Roebuck. Dampier was assigned an undermanned crew of inferior experience, and worse, Dampier and his first officer George

Fisher “took a strong dislike to each other and were quarrelling openly before they had even put to sea.”70 The expedition set off in January 1699 only after a significant delay in acquiring the necessary provisions. The delay forced Dampier to change his intended route from the cruise around the tip of South America to the easterly route around the Cape of Good Hope. Lieutenant

Fisher, who would later claim he feared the “Old Pyrating Dog” would abscond with the King’s ship, openly quarreled with Dampier in front of the men. Dampier had his lieutenant clapped in

68 Dampier and Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer, xi. 69 William Dampier and James Spencer, A Voyage to New Holland: The English Voyage of Discovery to the South Seas in 1699 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Nonsuch, 2006), 15. 70 Dampier and Spencer, A Voyage to New Holland, 23.

48 irons and interned at a Portuguese jail in Bahia, Brazil before continuing on to New Holland.71 The expedition managed to make the northwest shore of the Australian continent, but for lack of water was forced to sail northwards into more familiar waters in the East Indies. Dampier charted only a small portion of New Holland, but he refined his charts of the South Seas winds and tides. But for all his talents as a navigator, Dampier apparently had little talent as a commander. His crew grew restless and neglected their duties. Dampier failed to regularly careen the hull of the Roebuck to keep it free of tropical wood-eating worms, and his ship’s carpenter was insufficient to the task of keeping up with the necessary repairs. Fearing to linger in the South Seas any longer, Dampier sailed back for the Cape of Good Hope and made it within sight of in the South

Atlantic when the Roebuck’s hull finally gave out. Dampier and his crew remained stranded on

Ascension Island for six weeks before a passing convoy of East Indiamen rescued them and returned them to London in August of 1701.

Dampier’s troubles did not end with the journey’s conclusion. When he arrived in London, the Admiralty convened a court martial against Dampier for the mistreatment of his crew, particularly of Lieutenant Fisher, who had returned to London the year prior and began to lay the groundwork for formal charges. In June 1702, William Dampier was found guilty of mistreating an officer of the Royal Navy, fined all his pay for the previous three years, and deemed unfit to be employed as commander of any of Her Majesty’s ships.72 Fortunately enough for Dampier, the War of the Spanish Succession—called Queen Anne’s War in England—broke out the following month.

England again needed privateers, and only a few months after his court martial and apparent disgrace, the former buccaneer turned explorer found himself in audience with Queen Anne and

71 Dampier and Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer, xi. 72 Dampier and Spencer, A Voyage to New Holland, 27.

49 receiving a Letter of Marque to command a privateering enterprise funded by and London businessmen.

Dampier commanded two ships, the St. George and , and in May 1703, he set out from Ireland with the intent of returning to his buccaneer hunting grounds on the Pacific Coast of South America. Once again, however, Dampier proved ill-suited to command. He left his first officer at the Cape Verde Islands a mere five months after starting the voyage and his first engagements with the Spanish in the Pacific were tentative affairs as Dampier seemed unwilling to engage in pitched fighting of any sort. His men began to suspect him of being a coward.

While careening and provisioning the ships at the Juan Fernández Islands, Dampier faced his first mutiny. Lieutenant Stradling took command of the Cinque Ports, and along with forty- two men, left Dampier and the St. George behind. One man by the name of willingly marooned himself at Juan Fernández, deep in Spanish territory with little hope of rescue, rather than continue with Dampier.

Dampier and his remaining crew managed to take a small Spanish carrack, but soon afterwards, another twenty-five of his men stole away with the vessel, setting sail for the East

Indies, taking half of the St. George’s provisions and Dampier’s letter of marque from Queen Anne.

The old buccaneer managed to convince the remainder of his crew that they could take the famed

Manila galleon off the port of , and in December 1704, he managed to find the great ship.

Even more fortunate, her captain had mistaken the bedraggled St. George for a supply ship and was not expecting an attack. Dampier had only to savage the vessel with a few broadsides to force her surrender, but instead, “to the bewilderment of his men, Dampier ran up the English ensign and let off a single warning shot.” The Spanish, so warned, responded with a devastating broadside and sailed off towards Mexico unscathed. Dampier lost even more of his crew. He was, however, able to capture a small Spanish vessel that served to carry his remaining crew of twenty-seven across

50 the Pacific when the St. George had to be abandoned. They sailed in their small Spanish prize to

Jakarta, where the Dutch arrested him as a pirate and detained him for a time before allowing him to return to England towards the close of 1707. At the age of fifty-six, William Dampier had completed his second circumnavigation of the globe, but had once again “returned minus, not only his own ship, but an assortment of sister ships, prize vessels, captains, lieutenants, crewmen, booty and his Letter of Marque.”73 Dampier was marked as an incompetent commander, and his investors considered suing him for fraud, though they had little hope for compensation for he once again had nothing to his name.

From Freebooting to Free Trade: Pirate Contributions to the English Empire

William Dampier may have been an immense disappointment to his investors and a failure as a captain, but his contribution to the expanding English Empire is hard to ignore. Here is the case of an admitted pirate who published a book in which he gave detailed descriptions of his crimes; yet, because he also described the places and people he encountered in great detail, he received the sanction and support of an English government interested in finding new ways to expand its Asian enterprise. Dampier’s thorough descriptions of the peoples he encountered could be seen as a precursor to the development of Anthropology in the Victorian Era. His descriptions of New Holland offered England a potential rival colony to the , and his accounts of the winds and tides were so accurate that they played an immense role in the success of later

British explorers such as Captain James Cook. Even the descriptions of his crimes offered a treasure trove of information to be exploited by subsequent generations, such as his description of opium smuggling, which would later become foundational to British commerce in Asia. In short,

William Dampier helped paved the way for imperial expansion by utilizing his buccaneering skills.

73 Dampier and Norris, The Buccaneer Explorer, xiv.

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Tracing it back further, had it not been for the English employment of the buccaneers under

Governor Thomas Modyford and Sir Henry Morgan for the protection of Jamaica, William

Dampier would likely not have acquired the skills and knowledge he utilized in his journeys.

Without the buccaneers, English colonies in the Caribbean likely would have been swept away by the Spanish, and the profits they generated could not have buoyed the burgeoning East India trade.

Even the infamous East India Company may not have been possible without the profits from Sir

Francis Drake’s infamous taking of the Cacafuego, and Drake would never have conceived of his raid had he not been a part of Sir John Hawkins’s smuggling operations.

Thus, without the efforts of early English pirates, there very likely would be no English

Empire. Hawkins, Drake, Morgan, and Dampier were all pirates, utilizing force of arms and violence to seize the possessions of others. Because they did so at a time when England needed such men to improve its position, the government sanctioned their actions and made them national heroes. But the English love affair with pirates would soon come to an end.

With the ratification of the Acts of Union in 1707, the English Empire became the British

Empire and the Union Jack began to ply the seas. The newly-minted British East India Company continued to expand its trade relationships and generate immense profits for itself and the imperial treasury. Further, the colonies grew ever more secure in their positions as successive generations built fortifications, expanded farmlands, and established strong militias. In effect, the frontier zones on the edge of the empire begun to shrink, replaced by more modern trade networks that viewed piracy as a threat rather than an opportunity. The empire’s need for pirates waned, and with that perceptions changed. The type of men who had been hailed as heroes thus became the villains.

The Empire labeled such men hostes humani generis—enemies of all mankind.

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Chapter 3

SECURING THE EMPIRE: JACK TAR, LIBERTALIA, AND CIVILIZATION

Hostes Humani Generis – Enemies of all mankind.

Labor at Sea: Jack Tar’s Poor Wages

The lot of the common sailor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was less than ideal. By 1693, Henry Avery had sailed in the British merchant marine and Royal Navy for nearly two decades with little to show for it. Throughout his sailing career, Avery experienced the hardships typical of the sailor’s life: poor pay, cramped living conditions, terrible rations, dangerous work, and most of all, harsh discipline. Jack Tar—a colloquialism for common sailors referencing their tarred breeches—certainly lived a hard life and often found himself at the mercy of powers beyond his control. While at sea, the ship’s captain held complete authority over all aspects of life, ruling over what Edward Braithwaite—a maritime scholar specializing in the seventeenth century—called a hydrarchy.74 The captain always had a vested interest in the voyage’s profits and the legal means to enact discipline upon his crew in order to ensure the timely and profitable operation of his ship. More often than not, Jack Tar’s captains and officers ruled through terror, with the slightest infraction garnering a beating or worse. Sailors lived hard lives at sea, their days filled with heavy and dangerous labor, their nights spent in cramped hammocks, their meals consisting of often-substandard rations thanks to penny-pinching captains and inefficient food preservation. Discipline, danger, disease, malnutrition, isolation, and exposure combined to make a misery of Jack Tar’s life.75

74 Marcus Rediker, “Hydrarchy and Libertalia: The Utopian Dimensions of Atlantic Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Pirates in the Age of Sail, by Robert J. Antony (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), 166. 75 Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 65.

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Voyages at sea in the seventeenth century lasted weeks, months, and sometimes years, and for putting up with all the aforementioned hardships, Jack Tar could only expect to make about twenty shillings (£1) per month. Sailors made less in a year than teacher (£16), farm laborers (£18), shopkeepers (£45), and certainly less than their officer (£33-45).76 Collecting such meager salaries could prove more difficult than earning them. Many merchant captains paid in colonial currencies worth a fraction of a British pound, and almost all of them docked their sailors’ wages for inevitable damage to the cargo or ship incurred during the journey. All said and done, Jack Tar often earned far less than £12 in a year; his final salary came much closer to £4.10s after deductions, taking into account colonial currencies. Making matters worse, upon returning to port after a long journey, some unfortunate sailors found themselves pressed into service with the Royal Navy, particularly in time of war, which was frequently the case. Once pressed, these men had little chance of receiving any pay for their merchant service, and conditions in the Royal Navy—with harsher discipline, worse pay, and the added danger of potential combat—proved to be so terrible that nearly half of all Royal Navy sailors died at sea. Adding insult to injury, only able-bodied sailors could earn a living by plying their skills; a beggar’s life waited for those injured due to accident or combat.77 After more than two decades at sea, subjected to such conditions, Henry Avery decided to try his hand at something potentially more profitable.

Warfare between England and its Dutch, French, and Spanish imperial rivals presented merchants and sailors alike with the opportunity for profit through privateering. Private investment firms put up the funds to arm, outfit, and man warships that would then serve the national interest by supplementing the Royal Navy and preying upon the mercantile networks of England’s foes.

Privateers would receive legal sanction to take as prizes any vessel flying under enemy colors

76 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 34. 77 Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic, 65.

54 through force of arms. Such prizes offered potentially enormous profits for investors, and the work generally paid better than the merchant marine, sometimes offering sailors a share of the spoils.

This made privateering an attractive option for investor and sailor alike, despite the high risks involved. In Avery’s case, an investment group had outfitted a squadron with the intent to receive a privateering commission from the Spanish king for the raiding of French shipping and settlements in the Caribbean as part of the War of the Grand Alliance. Sir James Houblon, a London banker and the head of the investment group, personally guaranteed one-month’s advance salary, regular payments to be made to the men or their families every six months throughout the squadron’s deployment, and the potential to earn a share of any prize the expedition captured. With his experience and distinguished service record, Henry Avery hired on as the first-mate aboard the flagship, the forty-six-gun frigate Charles II, commanded by Captain Charles Gibson.78

Seeking Fortune: Privateering and Mutiny

Upon arriving at La Coruña, Spain, Avery’s expedition set up to wait for Spanish officials to produce their commission. While waiting, Avery and the expedition’s other officers met to discuss potential targets in the Caribbean. One of the other officers was William Dampier, second mate of the Dove, the soon-to-be-infamous former buccaneer who was in the process of compiling his notes on his first circumnavigation of the globe for publication. The Spanish bureaucracy moved exceptionally slowly, and after months of waiting, many of the men began to wonder why their promised semi-annual salaries had not arrived. Houblon, safely ensconced back in London, gave orders to Captain Gibson to have those who complained shackled in the ships’ brigs, to serve as examples to the others. If the sailors believed that discipline would be any different on this journey than on others, they were quickly disabused of that notion. A few sailors managed to send

78 Joel H. Baer, “’Captain John Avery’ and the Anatomy of a Mutiny,” Eighteenth Century Life, Vol. 18 (February 1994), 4-5.

55 letters to their families, informing them of the sailors’ plight and asking them to visit Houblon in person to request their promised wages. Houblon’s response confirmed the sailors’ worst fears: he said that the ships and their crews were the Spanish king’s responsibility now, and that King Charles

II could “pay them or hang them as he pleased.”79 Avery and many of the crew believed that the investment group had effectively sold them into the indefinite service of Spain, and they began to look into ways to escape.

By May of 1694, Avery had gathered enough support to try a mutiny. With the help of sailors from all four of the expedition’s vessels, Avery’s men successfully took control of Charles

II, put Captain Gibson and all others who would not join them into a boat, and sailed off into the

Atlantic. Once safely away, Avery called a meeting of the crew and laid out his plan: they would raid ships and settlements as originally intended, but not in the Caribbean where they would be expected, and not for the profit of men like Sir James Houblon. Avery proposed that the crew make their way around Africa, crossing the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, where they could plunder the riches of the Orient. The crew would divide loot equally, with the captain and receiving only one extra share to cover their additional duties, and a portion of the loot would be set aside to compensate the injured and the families of the dead. Further, decisions affecting the ship and crew would generally be handled democratically, with combat being the only time where the captain had absolute authority. What Avery suggested was outright piracy based on the buccaneer model. It is very likely that Avery conceived of this through his interactions with

Dampier and other former pirates on the expedition, given that Avery himself had never sailed in a pirate crew. Given the circumstances, Avery’s proposal seemed to be the best option available to the crew. If they were to sail back to England, they would be at worst hung for mutiny and at best

79 Baer, “Captain John Avery,” 9.

56 no better off than they were when they signed on to the expedition. If, however, they followed

Avery’s plan, they would sail as risk-sharing partners who would enjoy an equal share of the spoils rather than as wage-laborers whose efforts only enriched wealthy investors. Avery’s plan laid out the terms of their partnership into which man could enter of his own free will while retaining the freedom to leave at any time.80 Most of the crew consented to Avery’s plan and they held an election to nominate Avery as captain and rename their ship the . Dissenters were allowed to take a boat to shore and watched while the pirates sailed away.

Over the next thirteen months, Avery’s gang sailed and plundered along Africa’s coasts and into the Indian Ocean. Avery made it clear that he and his men were no enemies of England, publishing a letter containing instructions to English captains to avoid being molested:

To all English Commanders, let this satisfie, That I was riding here at this instant in the Ship Fancy Man of War, formerly the Charles of the Spanish Expedition, who departed from Croniae the 7th of May 1694 Being (and am now) in a Ship of 46 Guns, 150 Men, and bound to Seek our Fortunes. I have never as yet wronged any English or Dutch, nor ever intend whilst I am Commander. Wherefore as I commonly speak with all Ships, I desire whoever comes to the perusall of this to take this Signall, That if you, or any whom you may inform, are desirous to know what wee are at a distance, Then make your Ancient [ensign] up in a Ball of Bundle and hoist him at the Mizenpeek, the Mizen being furled. I shall answer with the same and never molest you, for my Men are hungry, Stout, and resolute, and should they exceed my Desire I cannot help myself. As yet an Englishmans Friend

HENRY AVERY81

The lone exception occurred in May, when the pirates detained three English merchants taking on a cargo of salt in the Cape Verde Islands. Avery relieved the merchants of provisions and an anchor, but helpfully provided them with a receipt. Less thoughtfully, he forced nine members of their

80 Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic, 70. 81 “Petition of the East India Company. July, 1696.” In Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson (New York: MacMillan Co., 1923), 144.

57 crew to join his gang, apparently because they had skills required by Avery and his crew.82 Pirates would often offer sailors on captured vessels the opportunity to join the crew willingly, and many often did so, but on occasion men would be forced against their will when they had a skill the crew needed—doctors, carpenters, and pilots could find themselves pressed into service, but even pressed men received and equal share of the plunder and often letters from the captain stating that their service was involuntary.

Avery and his men were less cordial to those they encountered who were not English. Off the coast of West Africa, Avery lured native tribesmen aboard the Fancy with the promise of trade and promptly relieved them of their gold, clapped them in irons, and sold at least seven of them into . In the Indian Ocean, they would often take Arab trading vessels and, after relieving them of their valuable cargos, proceed to burn the ships rather than return them to their captains.

And off the coast of Somalia, the Fancy burned the town of Mayd to the ground after its residents refused to trade with them.83 It was in Somalia that Avery’s crew learned of a prize rich enough to set them all up for life.84 The Mughal Emperor, being a Muslim, sent a treasure fleet each year from

Surat to the port of Jeddah to trade with Mecca and Medina, and Avery had arrived just in time to catch the treasure fleet setting out through the Bab al-Mandab Strait to catch the monsoon winds on its way back to India with a hold full of gold and jewels.

82 “Examination of John Dann, 3 August 1696” in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson (New York: MacMillan Co., 1923), 152. 83 Edward Randolph, “Edward Randolph to William Popple” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 16, 1697-1698, ed. J.W. Fortescue (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1905), 171-187. 84 “Examination of John Dann, 3 August 1696,” 152-153.

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Hunting Exceeding Treasure: English Piracy in the Indian Ocean

In August 1695, Avery set sail for the Bab al-Mandab Strait, connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, where he met up with five smaller English vessels who also had a mind to raid the Mughal fleet, including , a privateer on a commission from the governor of New

York to raid enemy—meaning French—shipping.85 The presence of Tew and the others demonstrated just how blurred the lines between privateer and pirate had become in the century since Sir Francis Drake’s death in 1596. Provided that they returned a profitable cargo and operated as discreetly as possible, these privateers could reasonably expect to receive pardons for their piracy in exchange for a larger share for their sponsor.86 Avery hosted Tew and the other four captains to discuss working together, and they agreed to split equitably any plunder they acquired. The pirates set up in the Straits, doused their lanterns and waited for the treasure fleet to arrive.

Knowing that the Bab al-Mandab Strait was a likely spot for pirates, the captains of the treasure fleet sailed through the night with their own lanterns doused. Most of the fleet sailed right past Avery and his men, until the dawn’s light betrayed a straggler, the Fath Mahmamadi. Bigger than the Fancy but only lightly armed, the Fath Mahmamadi carried about £50,000 worth of gold and silver belonging to its captain. This was a sizeable prize, earning each man in pirate gang as much as £250, but when Avery discovered that most of the treasure fleet had already passed, he left a prize crew on the Fath Mahmamadi and set out across the Gulf of Aden to chase down the fleet. Two days later, the Fancy caught up with the Ganj-i-sawai, whose name appropriately enough translates to “Exceeding Treasure.” The massive Mughal vessel boasted twice as many guns as the Fancy and carried a virtual army of able-bodied men who could put up a fight, but the

85 McDonald, Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves, 93. 86 Guy Chet, The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688- 1856 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), 5.

59 opening salvo exchange went poorly for the Ganj-i-sawai’s captain, Muhammad Ibrahim. As the pirates closed, Captain Ibrahim ordered his gun crews into action. A moment later, one of the heavy cannon exploded, sending shards in all directions and disrupting the Mughal gun crews. The

Fancy’s first salvo struck the Ganj-i-sawai’s mainmast, crippling the larger vessel and allowing

Avery’s gang to come alongside and board the Indian vessel. Captain Ibrahim apparently panicked and resistance collapsed. Avery’s men had captured the largest treasure ship in the Mughal

Emperor Aurangzeb’s fleet, a ship owned by the emperor himself and carrying treasures worth

£150,000 worth of gold, silver, ivory, and jewels.87 The pirates took their time looting the vessel, abusing its crew, and accounting their spoils before releasing the Ganj-i-sawai and sailing away.

News of the attack spread fast. Sir John Gayer, the chief officer of the East India Company, sent a letter to London describing how the news was received by the people and governor of Surat:

On the … 11th [September], One of Abdull Gofores Ships arriving, their people sent the Governour word, that they were plundered by an English Vessell, severall of their Men killed in fight, and others barbarously used; Upon which there was a great noise in Towne, and the Rabble very much incensed against the English, which caused the Governour to send a Guard to Our Factory to prevent their doing any violence to Our People. the 13th in the Morning, the Gunsway [Ganj-i-sawai], one of the King’s Ships, arrived from Judda and Mocho, the Nocqueda and Merchants, with one voice, proclaiming that they were robbed by four English Ships near Bombay of a very great Sume… on which there was farr greater noise than before. upon this the Governour sent a very strong Guard to the Factory and clapt all our People in Irons, shut them up in a room …. We immediately wrote to Court… to represent Our Cause to the King, and to Excuse Our Selves from being concerned in those barbarous Actions. Wee Also wrote to the Governour of Surrat and all the Great Umbraws round Us to the same effect, hearing by all that come from Surrat, that that Citty is in an uproar about Us, and being informed also, that Severall Letters are gone to the Siddy (who is very near Us with an Army) from Court and Surat, wee are making what preparation Wee can for our Own defence, nott knowing what this Extream ferment may produce.88

87 “Examination of John Dann. 3 August 1696,” 153. 88 “Abstract, E.I. Co. Letters from Bombay. October 12, 1695.” in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson (New York: MacMillan Co., 1923), 145-146.

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While the East India Company and Mughal officials dealt with the fallout of Avery’s raid, the pirates made a hasty retreat across the Indian Ocean, headed for . Once in the safety of Madagascar’s mangroves, they divided the spoils among the pirate crews, and Avery’s men looked forward to making off with their own shares. A little more than two years after setting out from England on a privateering expedition that would have paid Avery’s sailors about £30 each to that point, Avery’s pirates managed to take two prizes worth more than £200,000, increasing each man’s income over the same period roughly thirty times over. But before the men could enjoy their spoils, they needed to find a safe place to lay low, fence their stolen wares, and slip back into civilization. Perhaps informed by the American privateers, Captain Avery knew just the place.

Seeking Safe Harbor: New Providence Colony

By 1696, Governor Nicholas Trott of New Providence Colony—Nassau Island, in the modern Bahamas—found himself in an unenviable situation. As a plantation colony situated in waters claimed by Spain, New Providence had only a few settlers and faced three ever-present dangers: tropical disease, slave revolt, and invasion. King William’s War against the French had been raging for eight years at that point, disrupting commerce and making the French the most likely to invade at the moment. With much of the war’s fighting taking place in Europe, the Royal

Navy could not afford to maintain a presence in the Caribbean, and the insecurity of New

Providence caused many of its settlers to flee for relatively better protection in Jamaica and South

Carolina. New Providence had no warships, and could only count upon the newly-constructed Fort

Nassau and about seventy men to defend the island.89 Recent rumors placed a French squadron in the area, and with such concerns on his mind, Governor Trott received a strange delegation.

89 “The Case of Nicholas Trott,” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 16, 1697-1698, ed. J.W. Fortescue (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1905), 485-510.

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A group of strangely dressed and rough looking men delivered a letter from their captain,

Henry Bridgeman, who remained aboard the Fancy at anchor outside Nassau’s harbor. Bridgeman claimed that his crew had arrived in from Africa, where they had been slave trading in violation of the ’s monopoly. Low on provisions and in need of shore leave, Bridgeman requested that the Fancy be allowed into the harbor and that her crew be allowed ashore with no questions asked. In return, Governor Trott would receive a personal gift worth about £900, or three times his annual salary. To sweeten the deal, Bridgeman offered Trott the

Fancy itself, once the crew had unloaded their cargo.90

Governor Trott called an emergency meeting of the governing council, where he appealed to their shared security interests. The presence of the frigate might dissuade a French invasion, and the addition of over one-hundred able-bodied men would certainly secure the island’s defenses.

Conversely, he argued, what would become of New Providence if Captain Bridgeman sought refuge with the French because the English turned them away? Violating the Royal African

Company’s monopoly seemed to be a fairly minor crime by comparison.91 Trott failed to mention the personal gift he would receive, which was later revealed in court. The entire council must have known that Bridgeman and his men were pirates, and that their story of trading in violation of the charter was likely made up, but Trott had made a convincing case, and the choice between giving unknown pirates a refuge or facing being burned out by the French, or by the pirates, was really no choice at all. The governor relayed the council’s acceptance of Captain Bridgeman’s terms.

Captain Avery, who employed the Bridgeman pseudonym to avoid recognition, sailed into

Nassau’s harbor, unloaded his cargo and crew, and gave the governor both the bribe and the Fancy.

90 “Examination of John Dann. August 3, 1696,” 151-154. 91 “Affidavit of Philip Middleton. November 11, 1696,” in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson, 157-158.

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Per the arrangement he had made with his crew off the coast of La Coruña in 1694, Avery’s men split their spoils and went their separate ways from New Providence. Some decided to stay on the island. Others made their way into the American colonies or Madagascar, which sported a relatively sizeable collection of pirates living in conjunction with the local Malagasy people. Avery and a few of his men bought a small ship and set sail for Ireland en route to England and home.92

It did not take long for Avery’s ruse in Nassau to come to light, but by the time it did he had already disappeared. Governor Trott, who feigned ignorance of Avery’s identity and piracy, flatly denied that he had been given any gifts but could not escape the scandal and resigned post.93

Avery reached Dublin and parted company with his remaining men. British authorities caught up with John Dann, one of Avery’s men, when a maid discovered £1,045 worth of gold—far more than any Jack Tar should reasonably have on his person—sewn into his quilted jacket. A London court tried Mr. Dann and several of his former shipmates for piracy, found them guilty, and publicly hanged them at the in London on November 25, 1696.94 Avery, however, disappeared into the fog of history, never to be heard from again.

A Legend is Born: Henry Avery, the Pirate King

Captain Avery’s tale quickly became the stuff of legends. Stories began to circulate through waterfront pubs portraying Avery as a maritime Robin Hood. These stories—the existence of which indicates that at least some of Avery’s men managed to avoid the authorities and tell tales of their adventures—inspired a 1709 book, The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery, the

Famous English Pirate, (Rais’d from a Cabbin-boy, to a King) now in Possession of Madagascar,

92 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 10-14 & 23-25. 93 “Journal of Council of Trade and Plantations” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 17, 1699 and Addenda 1621-1698, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1908), 62-63. 94 “Examination of John Dann. August 3, 1696,” 156.

63 and a 1713 play entitled The Successful Pyrate. Both book and play romanticize Avery’s tale, claiming that aboard the Ganj-i-sawai, the pirate captain found one of the Mughal emperor’s own daughters, married her, and established a pirate kingdom in Madagascar—what may later have become the legend of the , Libertalia.95

Such romanticized legends influenced an entire generation of young sailors. They inspired within these working-class men the concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity, particularly as alternatives to the exploitative form of capitalism then practiced in Britain. In the wake of the

Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights Act of 1689 which emphasized that the Crown must seek the consent of the people as represented by Parliament, wrote his infamous

Two Treatises of Government—a fundamental work in the development of Enlightenment thinking first published in 1689. Locke’s work had been circulating throughout England for over two decades by 1709, making it possible, perhaps even likely, that the romanticized pirate narratives tapped into and reinforced nascent Enlightenment theory and popularity, particularly among working-class sailors.96 If the Crown should have to seek the consent of the governed, it would logically follow that common sailors should have a say in the manner of their employment as well.

The marked popularity of Avery’s story belies a change taking place in the English Empire with regards to its pirates. Avery was not hailed as a hero outside of the common rooms of seaside taverns—quite the opposite, in fact—and this had more to do with the new nature of imperial commerce, and Avery’s target in particular, than it did with a newfound British aversion to piracy.

William Dampier’s book, A New Voyage Round the World, went to the presses in 1697, the year

95 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 23-27; Rediker, “Hydrarchy & Libertalia,” in Pirates in the Age of Sail, 167. 96 The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery, the Famous English Pirate, (Rais’d from a Cabbin-Boy to a King) now in Possession of Madagasgar (circa 1709); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis (London: A. Miller et al., 1764).

64 following Avery’s notorious crimes. Dampier described, in vivid detail, his own piracies against the Spanish and various peoples in the East Indies, yet Dampier was well regarded in English power circles. The hapless former buccaneer was not tried for piracy and hung from Execution Dock; he was given a commission and placed in command of a Royal Navy vessel sent to explore the shores of New Holland. Governor Trott lost his post, some of Avery’s men lost their lives, and others were hunted for the rest of their lives precisely because of who they robbed.

Imperial Wrath: International Implications of English Piracy

Since 1600, the East India Company and its Dutch counterpart, the Vereenigde Oost-

Indische Compagnie (VOC) had been making inroads into trade in the Indian Ocean. Breaking the tenuous Portuguese monopoly was only the first step, and the Portuguese only reluctantly gave ground to their northern counterparts. Within a decade of breaking into the Indian Ocean the East

India Company and the VOC, both operating relatively independently of their respective metropoles due to the distance involved, came to understand the nature of Indian Ocean trade and plan for the various factors that could make trade in the Orient so profitable for the Companies.

When the VOC captured Malacca in 1641 and made further inroads into the production centers of the Spice Islands in the and 1660s, the English feared that the Dutch would lock them out of the spice trade entirely, thus making the East India Company’s factories in India even more important for the future of English trade in the East.97 Unfortunately, things were not going well for the East India Company regarding India. In the , the Company attempted to obtain trading privileges throughout the Mughal Empire by force, but an Indian blockade of Bombay forced their surrender on Mughal terms.98 The company had only started generating profits again when Avery’s

97 Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, 83-85. 98 Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, 93.

65 men captured the Ganj-i-Sawai, throwing Aurangzeb into a fury. The Mughal Emperor shut down the East India Company’s factories, threatened to put an end to all English trading in India, and threatened to invade Bombay. The East India Company avoided disaster by promising to pay reparations to the tune of £600,000—approximately three times the value of the stolen goods—and launched a world-wide manhunt for Avery and any other pirate who had preyed upon Mughal or

Muslim shipping.99 Avery’s piracies threatened the prosperity of the Empire and demonstrated the potential dangers pirates represented to the continuing English imperial enterprise.

Official records and trial documents, including depositions of Mughal witnesses aboard the

Ganj-i-siswai, portrayed a markedly different image than the romanticized tales spreading through

English dockside taverns. These documents described Avery as a monster, presiding over a violent bacchanal wherein the pirates raped women, tortured passengers, and murdered at will.100 For

English officials, Avery represented a dangerous threat to maritime commerce and property rights, both directly as a pirate and indirectly as inspiration for others. English officials responded to this threat by reminding sailors of piracy’s high price with the public executions of Avery’s associates.

Prominent pirates could expect even worse; had he been captured, Captain Avery could expect his corpse to be dipped in tar and hung from an iron cage to provide would-be pirates with a ghoulish warning, as happened to Captain in 1701 after he was found guilty of piracy.101 The

English also attempted to remove potentially corrupt colonial officials from power, as they did with

Trott, and ordered their loyal officials to renew piracy efforts.102 Such gruesome

99 Douglas R. Burgess, “Piracy in the Public Sphere: The Trials and the Battle for Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Print Culture” in Journal of British Studies 48 (October 2009): 887-913. 100 Mountstuart Elphinstone, The History of India, Vol. 2 (Pickle Partners Publishing, 2013), 430- 431. 101 McDonald, Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves, 125. 102 “Proclamation of Lieut.-Gov. Stoughton. June 4, 1698” in Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents, ed. John Franklin Jameson (New York: MacMillan Co., 1923), 169-170.

66 displays and anti-piracy efforts may have assisted in placating the Mughal Emperor enough to allow the English to continue doing business in India, but they had relatively little effect on piracy, which continued to grow in the fertile soil of the frontier economies in the colonies, fertilized by the exploitation of sailors’ labor. As long as such factors existed, so too would pirates, and a perfect storm of conditions in the early-eighteenth century would set the stage for a in the Atlantic.

By the early-eighteenth century, the European powers had extended their influence throughout the world through trade, but their overseas holdings still existed very much as frontier zones. Settler colonies in the Americas remained relatively small and rural, dependent upon the trade networks to keep them supplied and to keep their economies running. The oriental companies supplanted the Muslim trade networks that preceded them, and they had made small but significant inroads into India, China, and Japan, but they were still dependent upon the goodwill of the Asian powers. The Dutch could trade with Japan, but only from the small island of Deshima, and they could only trade what the Japanese allowed. The English and Dutch both managed to establish limited trade with China in Canton, but only seasonally and again on Chinese terms. And the

English, Dutch, and French all traded with India, Persia, and the Middle East, but the Mughal blockade of Bombay reminded the Companies that the Asian states retained the balance of power in the region.103 These frontier zones were relatively tenuous, with any number of factors capable of bringing ruin, as the Dutch discovered in Formosa, when indigenous resistance and a Chinese fleet forced them out. 104 Europeans’ propensity to war with one another exacerbated the situation.

103 Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, 93-96. 104 Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600-1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 25-26.

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In War’s Wake: Instability in the Caribbean

The most recent wars in which the English fought—the Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652-1674),

Anglo-Spanish War (1654-1660), King William’s War (1688-1697), and Queen Anne’s War

(1701-1714)—all saw significant fighting and commerce raiding take place throughout the frontier zones of the European empires. These wars, and the periods of relative peace between them, wrought significant changes on the region and maritime trade, particularly in the Caribbean. In

1703, French and Spanish troops burned New Providence colony in Nassau, but failed to occupy it. New Providence remained a British colony, but one without an official government.105 In other words, Queen Anne’s War left a power vacuum in Nassau that lasted from 1703 until 1718.

Early in Queen Anne’s War, the Royal Navy destroyed the bulk of French and Spanish ships of the line, forcing France and Spain to adopt alternative means of naval warfare. Taking their cue from Queen Elizabeth and Sir Francis Drake, the French and Spanish turned to privateers equipped with small, fast vessels that could outrun the massive British ships of the line and prey on merchant shipping.106 The French and Spanish privateers soon made such a nuisance for British trade that British officials began to commission large numbers of privateers to counter the threat.

By the end of the war, nearly every British merchantman carried a commission.107 Thousands of sailors served as privateers in the merchant marine, and for more than a decade they honed the arts of maritime navigation, hunting and taking enemy ships, and disposing of their prizes in friendly ports of call—often colonial settlements or company trade posts who welcomed the extra commerce.

105 B. Granville, “Governor Sir B. Granville to William Popple,” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Vol. 21, 1702-1703, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913), 771-791. 106 N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 (London: W.W. Norton, 2004), 166-174. 107 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 55.

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Wartime necessities also forced British colonies to shift their economic patterns. In the best case, French and Spanish privateers delayed shipping and receiving goods; in the worst case, colonies could find themselves starved of necessary supplies, unable to bring their produce to market, or even exposed to invasion and ruin, as was the case with Nassau in 1703. As Queen

Anne’s War dragged on, British colonies came to rely more and more upon privateers to protect colonial commerce, prevent invasions, and provide necessary supplies and goods. By 1713, the colonies had developed systems adept at liquidating privateers’ prizes, which began to make up a significant and profitable portion of colonial commerce.108

The Peace of Utrecht abruptly ended Queen Anne’s War in 1713. British governors rescinded letters of marque, removing the legal authorization for privateers to take prizes and forcing merchants to return to safer but less profitable forms of maritime trade. In a cost-cutting move, the Royal Navy discharged 36,000 sailors in a swoop, flooding the market with available labor and driving down sailors’ salaries. By 1714, those sailors lucky enough to have work earned only half their 1712 wages.109 The effect on colonial economies was similarly devastating. Bereft of privateers’ prizes, colonial economic networks that had sustained the colonies throughout the war fell slack. Making matters worse, the peace had not changed Spanish attitudes toward British shipping in the Caribbean. The Spanish coast guard retained the right to stop and search English merchantmen for contraband, declaring as smugglers any vessel carrying so much as a single

Spanish coin, and since such coinage served as the de facto currency throughout the British colonies, the Spanish found and detained many such “smugglers.” The resulting disruption to

British shipping ranked on par with wartime privateering, but without the benefit of British

108 Chet, The Ocean is a Wilderness, 67. 109 Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic, 83-84.

69 privateers bringing in their own prizes.110 The combination of Spanish depravations and swarms of unemployed sailors quickly led to a new generation of pirates in the Caribbean.

Idle Hands: Benjamin Hornigold and the Flying Gang

Benjamin Hornigold and his lieutenant, Edward Thatch, served as privateers during the war, but by the summer of 1713 found themselves out of work, living in poverty in Port Royal,

Jamaica. Whether motivated by stories of successful pirates like Captain Avery, by a desire for revenge against the Spanish for the raids of the guardas costas, by simple economic realities, or most likely a combination of these factors, Hornigold and Thatch gathered a crew of like-minded sailors and set out to prey upon Spanish shipping. The Flying Gang, as Hornigold’s crew called themselves, built large open-water canoes called pariaguas with which they hoped to capture larger vessels. They simply needed a safe haven from which to operate along the lines of the buccaneers’ use of Island a century earlier. Located along the primary shipping channel for every

Europe-bound vessel in the Caribbean, and given the lack of official government, Nassau offered a perfect base of operations. Hornigold’s first expeditions over the summer of 1713 brought in cargoes worth over £13,000 to the community on Nassau, ten times the value of the entire Bermuda colony’s annual imports.111 With a base of operations and a steady supply of prey, the pirates of the Flying Gang only needed someone to fence their plunder, preferably someone closer than Port

Royal, where they would have to give up a share of the loot in official bribes and would run the risk of arrest and execution.

110 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 281-282. 111 Henry Pulleine, “Henry Pulleine to the Councel of Trade and Plantations, Bermuda: April 22, 1714” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Vol. 27, 1712-1714, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1926), 325-337.

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Richard Thompson, the largest and wealthiest landowner and merchant on Harbour Island, fifty miles north of Nassau, presents the most likely venue through which the Flying Gang could fence their pirated goods. Thompson had incentive to see harm done to the Spanish in return for the guardas coastas raids on Bahamian merchants, and one of his daughters had married John

Cockram, a member of Hornigold’s crew, who Thompson trained in the family business.112

Thompson and Cockram could purchase pirated goods at a fraction of market value, ship them to colonial cities like Charleston along with the legitimate products of their plantations and businesses, and legally sell the goods for a handsome profit.113 The Flying Gang’s activities thus supplemented the local economies around Nassau, providing incomes for smugglers, arms dealers, and other merchants. By the end of 1714, Nassau’s pirates brought in at least £60,000 worth of goods into the Bahamian economy, and they had only begun. But to this point, the Flying Gang’s activities were little more than a minor nuisance for the Spanish, who were more concerned with renewing the treasure fleet convoy system.

Going a Wrecking: Reaping the Gale on the Florida Coast

The Spanish treasure fleets had been carrying the riches of the New World and the Orient back to Spain for nearly two centuries by the eighteenth century. Throughout Queen Anne’s War,

Spain refused to send the treasure for fear that it would fall into enemy hands, but with the war’s end, the Spanish prepared to resume their convoys to relieve a stressed Spanish treasury. In July

1715, a treasure fleet carrying valuables worth £1,750,000 left Havana en route for Spain. They hoped to get out of the Caribbean before hurricane season set in, but a massive storm caught the

112 “Boston News Item,” Boston News-Letter, April 29, 1714. 113 When reading about pirates and the value of their plunder, it is important to remember that the pirates often only received a fraction of the total value as they often had to give a cut to middlemen like Thompson and Cockram, who in turn often had to pay bribes to get authorities to look the other way.

71 fleet off the Florida coast, sending all ten ships into the reef and ruin. Spanish survivors of the wrecks managed to organize and recover a large portion of the cargo, but a veritable fortune lay scattered off Florida’s beaches in water shallow enough for divers.114 Word of the wreck spread like wildfire throughout the region, and by the end of 1715, treasure seekers and rogues of all sorts began to gather off the Florida coast.

When the news of the wrecks reached Port Royal, mariners from all walks dropped everything to seek an easy fortune. John Balcher, commander of the Port Royal-based HMS

Diamond reported as many as five deserters a day, even as he prepared to sail back to England. “If

I had stay’d a week longer, I do believe I shou’d not have had men enough to have brought home,

I lost ten in two days before I sail’d being all mad to go a wrecking…. They say at Jamaica that the Spaniards are indebted to that Island a considerable sum of mony, and they must repay themselves.”115 Even Governor Archibald Hamilton of Jamaica managed to get caught up in the excitement. He first approached Commodore Balcher about using Royal Navy ships to loot the wrecks, but when Balcher refused, Hamilton decided to finance privateers instead. The governor knew he could not issue letters of marque against the Spanish—to do so would go against the Peace of Utrecht and risk war—so he needed another excuse to send privateers into the Florida Straits.

Hamilton had heard of the Flying Gang’s activities in Nassau and decided to use them as cover for his privateers. Officially, he ordered the privateers to hunt down pirates; unofficially, Hamilton instructed Captain Henry Jennings to raid the Spanish wrecks.116

114 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 105-106. 115 Captain Balchen, “Captain Balchen, H.M.S. Diamond, to Mr. Burchet. The Nore, 13th May, 1716” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 29, 1716-1717, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 76-101. 116 “Instructions for Captain , St. Jago de la Vega, Jamaica: 24 November 1715,” published as Appendix II in An Answer to An Anonymous Libel by Lord Archibald Hamilton, London: 1718.

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Since July, the Spanish had managed to salvage the majority of their wrecked treasure, securing over four million pesos in coins and cargo and storing it back in the safety of Havana, but their operation was not yet complete by December. Admiral Francisco Salmon and sixty of his soldiers guarded 350,000 pieces of eight worth about £87,500 near the site of two wrecked Spanish galleons—they did not expect to be set upon by a force of nearly two-hundred British privateers just after Christmas Day.117 Captain Jennings and his men relieved the Spanish of their treasure and sailed for Nassau.

Bahamian Gold Rush: The Making of a Pirate Nest

Due to its proximity to the Spanish wrecks, Nassau’s population exploded in late 1715.

Hundreds of wreckers and fortune seekers from all over the Americas joined the pirates who had been using the island as a base for two years. A motley collection of sailors debauched themselves on the shores, squatting in crude huts, drinking and fornicating away their way through their spoils.

Captain Hornigold and the Flying Gang had settled into Nassau quite well, claiming the island as their own and announcing that its residents were under their protection. The arrival of Captain

Jennings and his privateers presented a problem to Hornigold, not only because the privateers outnumbered the pirates, but because Jennings carried a letter of marque allowing him to hunt the

Flying Gang. Jennings, however, had no real interest in suppressing Hornigold and his pirates, but he did have an interest in bringing as much Spanish wealth as possible back to Port Royal. Jennings relieved Hornigold of a small Spanish trading vessel the Flying Gang had just captured and set off for Jamaica where Governor Hamilton waited to legally process and condemn Jennings’s prizes.118

117 “Journal, May 1716: Journal Book R,” in Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations: Volume 3, March 1715 – October 1718, ed. K H Ledward (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1924), 134-146. 118 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 131-133.

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The Spanish vessel Jennings confiscated did not represent a significant financial loss to the pirates, but it did represent a challenge to Hornigold’s authority. As a privateer, Jennings derived his authority from his investors and Governor Hamilton. Jennings had a fiduciary duty to return a profit, and in return, he received legal protection. As a pirate, however, Hornigold derived his authority from his men, who could impeach him if he did not perform to the crew’s expectations.119

Pirate captains served at the pleasure of the men, their powers kept in check through the vote of the crew and the quartermaster, their representative. Avoiding a fight with a superior force over a small prize may have been pragmatic, but Hornigold would have to make up the loss to his men if he wanted to keep them happy and remain in command.

In 1716, a few months after his run-in with Jennings, Hornigold and his men set out hunting off the northwest coast of , where they captured the Marianne, a French sloop carrying

£12,500 worth in cargo. From the crew of the Marianne, Hornigold learned of another French vessel in the area, the St. Marie, anchored in the Florida Keys, but when they arrived, they realized that someone else had beaten them to the punch. Henry Jennings continued to abuse his privateering commission after the incident at the Spanish wreck, and his crew captured the St. Marie with the assistance of Sam Bellamy and his pirate gang. Recognizing Hornigold and thinking to make another easy profit from him, Jennings ordered his ships to give chase, leaving the St. Marie and £7,125 worth of silver in the hands of Bellamy and his men. Sensing opportunity, Bellamy’s men loaded the silver aboard their periagua and slipped away. Jennings returned to the St. Marie already angry after Hornigold managed to slip away—he was furious to find that Bellamy had made off with the loot. Bellamy caught up with Hornigold off the coast of Cuba, and after a reading of the pirate articles—the document that outlined the rules by which pirates made compact with one

119 Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic, 70-71.

74 another—Black Sam Bellamy’s gang joined forces with the Flying Gang, with Bellamy taking command of the Marianne.120

Bellamy’s actions demonstrated the sense of community among pirates. As outlaws, pirates could not rely on the legal protection of government officials—they had to rely upon each other, and to do that, they had to be able to trust each other.121 Jennings’s seizure of Hornigold’s prize in Nassau at the end of 1715 indicated that Jennings was not to be trusted, particularly to someone of Bellamy’s mind. grew up in Devonshire, listening to the tales of

Robin Hood and Henry Avery the Pirate King as a boy of nine or ten. He sailed with the Royal

Navy in Queen Anne’s War, and found himself out of work once the war ended with few prospects for employment. He came to the Caribbean to scavenge the Spanish wrecks and soon gathered a group of like-minded fellows determined to take what they could from a system they perceived to have abandoned them to unemployment and abuse. 122 As outlaws, Bellamy and his men knew that they needed allies, and Hornigold’s Flying Gang, as fellow fugitives, made better friends than

Jennings and his men, who could, and likely would, use their privateering commission to justify betraying Bellamy’s pirates at the first opportunity. For Benjamin Hornigold, the addition of

Bellamy’s crew strengthened his position among the pirates of Nassau, making it less likely that

Jennings or anyone else would be able to again violate the Flying Gang by seizing their prizes.

Just as a pirate crew elected its captain through a vote, a collection of crews elected a commodore whenever multiple pirate crews gathered and decided to work together. As the most senior captain present, Hornigold made a logical choice for commodore, but his selection of targets began to disappoint some of his men. Benjamin Hornigold was apparently something of a patriot

120 The Trials of Eight Persons Indited for Piracy (Boston: John Edwards, 1718), 24. 121 Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic, 78-79. 122 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 134-135.

75 who believed that he and his men were still fighting Queen Anne’s War—perhaps hoping to have his piracies would be later justified if the Stuart line managed to regain the throne. He therefore refused to recognize the Peace of Utrecht and targeted French and Spanish vessels at will, but he refused to take English prizes. By August 1716, many of Hornigold’s men lost patience with the commodore, seeing his prohibition against taking English vessels as a denial of potential loot. For men who respected no flag but the Black, political sentiments such as Hornigold’s could not be borne.123 The men called for the commodore’s impeachment, his quartermaster called for a vote, and the crew voted to depose Benjamin Hornigold and elect Sam Bellamy as commodore.124 The pirates apparently harbored no ill-will towards Hornigold, however, as they allowed him to keep his sloop and sail away with a handful of loyal sailors, including Edward Thatch.

Jack Tar’s Revenge: Black Sam Bellamy, Prince of Pirates

At the age of twenty-seven, Bellamy found himself commodore of a pirate flotilla, with two sloops and nearly two-hundred men under his command. His crewmen consisted primarily of

English and Irish sailors, with a few Scots, Welsh, Spaniards, Dutchmen, and perhaps most notably, a few dozen freed slaves. He respected no flag, and was a ruthless raider, sailing up and down the

Caribbean and taking any prize that fell in his sights. In 1717, Bellamy’s crew captured the 300- ton Whydah, a slave trader making its way back to England with the proceeds from the sale of over three-hundred slaves. It was the appearance of freed slaves in Bellamy’s crew that convinced

Captain , knowing that, as a slave trader, he would receive no mercy if he

123 “The Black” being the colors flown by pirate ships, marking them as separate from any nation, in league only with each other. 124 Archibald Hamilton, “Governor Hamilton to the Council of Trade and Plantations,” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 29, 1716-1717, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 263-280.

76 resisted.125 With the Whydah at the head of his flotilla, Bellamy gave command of the Marianne to his friend Paulsgrave Williams, and Black Sam Bellamy had a fleet with which he could challenge any power in the Americas. The poor boy from the West Country began to style himself the “Prince of Pirates” in the tradition of Avery’s legend. Bellamy saw himself as a man of conscience, free from the shackles of a world that robbed the poor for the benefit of the rich and determined to exact his revenge on the same. A General History of the Pyrates relates a conversation between Bellamy and Captain Beer after the pirate captured the latter’s sloop and offered him a place in his crew:

Damn ye altogether! Damn them a pack of crafty Rascals. And you, who serve them, a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls! They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference: they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment? You are a devilish conscience rascal! I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who as a hundred sail of ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me! But there is no arguing with such sniveling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure, and pin their faith upon a pimp of a Parson, a squab who neither practices nor believes what he tells the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.126

Bellamy captured Beer while sailing for , where he hoped to refit and repair his ships off the coast of —as pirates, they had no access to proper shipyards. His holds were full of treasure and his crew in high spirits, but Bellamy would not long enjoy his success. In April

1717, a vicious nor’easter caught Bellamy’s fleet and dashed it against the rocks of . The

Whydah and two of her consorts sank, leaving only nine survivors out of nearly two-hundred pirates. Bellamy and most of his crew drowned, and the local constabulary rounded up the survivors and packed them off to Boston, where they were tried and hung as pirates in October.127

125 “Pirates of the Whydah,” National Geographic, May 1999, accessed October 9, 2016, http://www.nationalgeographic.com/whydah/main.html. 126 Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, 587.

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Libertalia Realized: The Pirate Commonwealth in Nassau

Figure 6: New Providence Island. An exact draught of the island of New Providence one of the Bahama Islands in the West Indies, ca. 18th century. Geography and Map Division. Digital Image. Nassau’s harbor is located in the southwest corner of the island, with Fort Nassau at the west end.

While Bellamy’s crew ravaged the Caribbean, Nassau continued to gather a motley collection of misfits and outcasts who hoped to profit in the , either by joining a pirate crew or by trading with the pirates. Taverns, brothels, and warehouses joined the ramshackle hovels built out of the hulks of looted ships beneath the crumbling ramparts of Fort Nassau, and business was good. A constant supply of prizes kept the warehouses full of stolen goods, which were then sold to profit-minded merchants like the Thompsons and Cockrams, which in turn kept the pirates in coin and the taverns and brothels in business. The fact that the tiny island had no official government made such commerce possible. Other places had served as pirate havens in the past, such as the buccaneer strongholds of Tortuga in the Florida Keys and Port Royal in Jamaica. But

Tortuga lacked Nassau’s merchant connections, limiting its profitability, and Port Royal had an official presence, which meant bribes and risk of being jailed or hung. Of all the pirate havens in the Caribbean, only Nassau had both merchants and a lack of official government, making it

127 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 174-193.

78 attractive to every sort of rogue in the Atlantic.128 But even a place like Nassau required rules, and the pirates found their rules in the pirate articles—the documents they signed that governed their behavior within a pirate crew. This essentially meant that the pirates at Nassau entered into a common contract with each other, forming what historians have called a pirate republic—which is a problematic term for its implications of representation—though perhaps pirate commonwealth is a better fit, for Nassau’s pirates formed no governing or representative body, but rather worked together to maintain conditions that served the common good. But for all the liberties afforded in such a commonwealth, some captains realized Nassau’s vulnerable state—it would take only a small squadron from either Spain or Britain to dislodge the pirates and ruin their haven—and these captains began to take actions to shore up Nassau’s defenses.

Following his impeachment in 1716, Hornigold returned to Nassau, where he found his old rival, Henry Jennings, carousing in the taverns. With the arrest of Governor Hamilton on suspicion of supporting the Jacobite uprising against King George I, Jennings lost his connections in Jamaica and all legitimacy as a privateer, but like many privateers of the time, Jennings found he liked the pirate life, so he moved his crew to Nassau. 129 Hornigold and Jennings were apparently able to put their past behind them and work in common cause, with the first order of business being the improvement of the island’s defenses. They transferred captured cannon to the crumbling battlements of Fort Nassau, and they positioned a captured Spanish hulk to serve as a floating gun platform in the harbor.130 With such defenses in place, the pirates could both maintain the peace in

128 Chet, The Ocean is a Wilderness, 54. Chet’s work provides insight to the economic benefits of piracy and privateering to frontier communities in the eighteenth century, though Nassau was an exceptional case. 129 Hamilton, “Governor Hamilton to the council of Trade and Plantations,” 107-128. 130 Alexander Spotswood, “Lt. Governor Spotswood to the Council of Trade and Plantations” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 29, 1716-1717, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 336-344.

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Nassau by putting all vessels who chose to do business there under their guns, and they could mount an impressive defense against all but the largest British, French, or Spanish squadrons, though none of the major powers had either the ships or the will to pursue active anti-piracy campaigns at the time. Both the British and French navies were rebuilding in the wake of Queen Anne’s War, and the loss of Spanish ships off the coast of Florida would take some time to recoup. Further, the few

Royal Navy ships in the Caribbean were busy trying to track down Bellamy’s flotilla. Between

1716 and 1718, the pirates essentially had the run of the place, and they made the most of the opportunity, returning large hauls to Nassau, though not without notice.

Word of this pirate commonwealth spread quickly throughout the Americas, raising alarms for many colonial governors, though not for the threat it represented to shipping. Under the pirates,

New Providence became a sanctuary for runaway slaves with the potential to destabilize the slave societies throughout the region. Citing these concerns, the governor of Bermuda reported to the

Council of Trades and Plantations that “the negro men they are grown soe very impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their riseing, soe that we can have noe dependence on their assistance but to the contrary on occasion should fear their joyning with the pirates.”131

Despite officials’ concerns, the pirates remained an extremely profitable trade partner for regional merchants like the Thompsons and Cockrams, whose deals with American merchants from as far away as Boston kept their warehouses stocked with enough supplies to keep the pirates in operation.

With the support of the local merchants, improved defenses, and growing pirate fleets, Hornigold and Jennings began to think they could turn Nassau into something resembling Libertalia, Captain

Avery’s legendary pirate kingdom in Madagascar. And while pursuing Avery’s legend, the

Bahamian pirates made legends of their own, none more popular than that of Blackbeard.

131 Lt. Governor Bennett, “Lt. Governor Bennett to the Council of Trade and Plantations” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 242-264.

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A New Legend: Blackbeard, Terror of the Atlantic

Edward Thatch, Hornigold’s long-time loyal lieutenant, received his own command in

1716 and began calling himself Blackbeard. Thatch understood the value of a fearsome appearance and reputation in piracy. If a target believed the Devil himself sailed after them, they were more likely to surrender without a fight. Blackbeard did his best to look the part; A General History of the Pyrates describes Blackbeard’s impressive visage:

This Beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant Length; as to Breadth, it came up to his Eyes…. In Time of Action, he wore a Sling over his Shoulders, with three brace of Pistols, hanging in Holsters like Bandaliers; and stuck lighted Matches under his Hat, which appeared on each Side of his Face, his Eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a Figure, that Imagination cannot form an Idea of a Fury, from Hell, to look more frightful.132

Figure 7: Captain Teach commonly call’d Black Beard. , A General History of the Pyrates (London: T. Warner, 1724), 70. Blackbeard’s name can be referred to as Teach or Thatch, depending on the source.

132 Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, 87-88.

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Blackbeard sailed up and down the Atlantic seaboard, terrorizing merchants from New

York to Bermuda, taking no less than fifteen vessels, and establishing a reputation as the most feared pirate in the Americas. He instructed his crew to tell intentionally misleading rumors to the crews of ships they captured in order to throw off any pursuit and to sow terror. In 1717,

Blackbeard and his crew captured La Concorde, a French slave ship en route from Africa to

Martinique with a cargo full of slaves. La Concorde was big, fast, and potentially as powerful as any ship in the Americas. Blackbeard decided to use the ship as his flagship, renaming her the

Queen Anne’s Revenge and arming her with forty guns.133 With the Queen Anne’s Revenge and a flotilla of smaller vessels at his disposal, Blackbeard commanded a force that could challenge any of the state navies in the Americas.

The pirates and the merchants with whom they associated traded on rumor as well as coin, and rumor had it that the HMS Shoreham had recently returned to Virginia and was in such a poor state that her captain refused to leave Chesapeake Bay. Similarly, the HMS Scarborough’s crew was said to be nearly incapacitated by disease.134 This left only two or three British ships to protect thousands of miles of coastline from Barbados to Maine, and word of Bellamy’s exploits in the

Caribbean seemed to reinforce the notion that for the time being, the pirates had free reign.

Then bad news arrived. First, Sam Bellamy’s lieutenant, Paulsgrave Williams, sailed into

Nassau aboard the storm-battered and jury-rigged Marianne—the same ship that Hornigold awarded to Bellamy back in 1716. He related the news of Bellamy’s passing, which incensed

Blackbeard, who swore vengeance on the people of New England and set out to terrorize the

Atlantic Coast. While sailing under Hornigold, Thatch conducted himself with restraint, but now that he was on his own and seeking vengeance for the execution of Bellamy’s men, Blackbeard

133 Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, 71. 134 “New York Dispatch, July 29,” Boston News-Letter, August 5, 1717, 2.

82 sought to bring as much damage to British commerce as possible. He refused to unnecessarily take lives, but once his crew had taken everything of value from a prize, Blackbeard would make his captors watch as they would either dump or burn the rest of the cargo. He sailed constantly, never remaining in one place for long and seemingly picking his targets at random. Traumatized captains and crews gathered in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston, and maritime insurance companies began to lobby in earnest that the pirate threat be put down.135 King George dispatched at least four frigates to patrol the American coast, forcing Blackbeard to turn back towards the

Caribbean to continue his personal war against British commerce for the next year, but he would soon return to the American colonies for one last audacious raid.

On May 18, 1718, in perhaps the most brazen act of an already-colorful career, Blackbeard and his crew blockaded the port at Charleston, South Carolina, took hostages, and made a strange demand of the governor. The pirates required a chest containing a list of medicines worth no more than £400.136 This event remains one of the great mysteries surrounding Blackbeard. The relatively low ransom suggests that perhaps Thatch could likely have acquired the necessary medicines through one of his smuggling contacts. That he chose instead to blockade Charleston potentially speaks to desperation or deception—perhaps one of Blackbeard’s crew had fallen ill, or perhaps the blockade served as a distraction to some other end. Unfortunately, this part of the Blackbeard legend, though mentioned in several accounts, is likely to remain a mystery as the list of medicines demanded has either not survived or not yet been found. In any case, Governor Robert Johnson

135 “Philadelphia Dispatch, October 24,” Boston News-Letter, November 11, 1717; “New York Dispatch, October 28,” Boston News-Letter, November 11, 1717; “Philadelphia Dispatch, October 31,” Boston News-Letter, November 11, 1717; “New York Dispatch, November 4,” Boston News-Letter, November 11, 1717; Chet, The Ocean is a Wilderness, 51-65. 136 “Governor Johnson to the Council of Trade and Plantations,” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 264-287.

83 produced the ransom, prompting Blackbeard to release his hostages, lift the blockade, and sail away, likely to contemplate his next steps in a changing environment, for one of the ships the pirates captured at Charleston carried unexpected news.

Civilization’s Champion: The Tale of Woodes Rogers

On September 5, 1717, King George I issued a royal proclamation decreeing a pardon for any pirate who surrendered to British authorities within one year.137 The Act of Grace represented a severe break with traditional British anti-piracy policies. Woodes Rogers, the mastermind behind this new policy, understood that traditional methods could not deal with the sheer scope of pirate activity in the Americas. Blackbeard alone had over four-hundred skilled men at his disposal and a flotilla of warships, making the prospect of direct military action costly, likely to only reinforce the pirates’ views of tyrannical British rule, and most likely to result in merely relocating the problem from the Bahamas to Africa, India, or elsewhere. Rogers surmised from his personal experience that in order to deal with piracy, the empire needed to find a way to re-civilize the pirates, and that process began with the Act of Grace.

Woodes Rogers was raised the eldest son of a moderately-wealthy Bristol merchant family that made its money fishing off the Newfoundland Coast and trading slaves between Africa and the

Caribbean. Rogers’s father died in 1704, leaving Woodes to run the family business, and in 1707, he received one of his father’s closest friends, the famous navigator, William Dampier. When

Woodes was young, Dampier would tell him stories of Henry Avery and his fellow pirates, with whom Dampier had spent months holed up in the harbor of La Coruña in 1694. Dampier had just returned from a disastrous privateering mission to strike at Spanish shipping in the Pacific, but he still believed in the concept and found a willing investor in Rogers.

137 George I, “A Proclamation for Suppressing of Pirates, Hampton Court: 5 September 1717,” London Gazette, September 17, 1717.

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Rogers and Dampier gathered other investors and purchased two newly-built frigates, the thirty-six-gun Duke and the twenty-six-gun Dutchess. The investors appointed the twenty-nine- year-old Rogers to command the expedition and hired Dampier as the chief navigator.138 Setting out in 1703 with 333 crewmen and an extra compliment of officers, the expedition ran into trouble right away. The Duke’s crew mutinied when Rogers refused to take a neutral Swedish ship as a prize. To Rogers’s crew, this decision deprived them of plunder. Rogers’s officer retained control of the ship and managed to capture the mutiny’s ringleaders, who expected to be executed. But, perhaps remembering Dampier’s tales of the Avery revolt, Rogers knew that terror would not win him the crew’s loyalty and respect. He placed the ringleaders in irons and sent them back to

England on a passing ship. For the rest, he assigned light punishments and returned them to duty.

Rogers even took the time to address his entire crew to explain his reasoning in refusing to attack the Swedish ship and the legal implications of attacking a neutral vessel. Mutiny avoided, the expedition braved the treacherous waters around the southern tip of South America and into the

Pacific.139

In January 1709, Dampier piloted the expedition to Juan Fernández Island, which he knew to be a good place to provision the ships and make repairs without alerting the Spanish to their presence. To everyone’s surprise, a solitary man wearing goatskins stood on the shore, waving a white flag. The expedition had just found Alexander Selkirk, the whose story would later inspire to write . Selkirk had lived alone on the island for fifty-two months, ever since he had decided to take his chances on the island rather than continue sailing with William Dampier on his last expedition. Selkirk had managed to survive all this time alone

138 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 70-71. 139 Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Around the World, originally published 1712 (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928), 8-33.

85 on a diet of turnips, goats, fish, and wild cabbage, and he had twice evaded Spanish sailors; he was overjoyed at seeing Englishmen, but when he discovered that William Dampier was with the expedition, Rogers had to convince Selkirk that Dampier was only the navigator and not in charge.

Selkirk agreed to join the expedition as long as he was never on the same vessel as Dampier.140

Over the next several months, Rogers’s expedition sailed along the western coast of South

America, taking Spanish and French prizes as they presented themselves. Rogers continued to deal with discontent among his crew. Believing that Rogers and his officers received too much of the loot, sixty of his men signed a document attesting that they would stop work unless they received a more equitable distribution of the plunder. Perhaps Rogers’s sailors remembered the Avery story as well, and thus believed that Rogers’s fourteen shares were too much when Avery only received two.141 Rogers made concessions to mollify the crew and in December 1709, they crossed paths with the Nuestra Señora de la Incarnación Disenganio, one of the famous Manilla galleons. In the ensuing battle, Rogers took a musket ball in the face, but the Duke and Dutchess managed to overcome the Incarnación and claim £100,000 worth of valuable cargo. They also learned of a second treasure galleon, the Nuestra Señora de Begoña, which they caught up with on Christmas day. In a running battle, Rogers was injured again when a wooden splinter tore through his foot and calf, but the Begoña proved too strong for the privateers. One of Rogers’s officers estimated that they had fired over three-hundred cannonballs into the Begoña, but their six-pounders simply could not penetrate the galleon’s thick hull.142 Rogers called off the pursuit and set sail across the

Pacific and back to England by way of Guam, the East Indies, and Madagascar. They dropped anchor in the Thames in October 1711, three years after setting out in 1708.

140 Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea and Round the World (London: B. Lintot and R. Gosling, 1712), xx-xxi. 141 Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Around the World, 172-177. 142 Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea, 346-352.

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The expedition earned £147,975 in proceeds. After expenses, investors found their money doubled. Rogers, his face mutilated and foot mangled, received about £1,600. Many of the crew received nothing at all, falling victim to royal Navy press gangs as soon as the expedition reached

London.143 The voyage also made Woodes Rogers into a celebrity. Few British men had commanded a successful circumnavigation of the globe, and only two others—Francis Drake and

Thomas Cavendish, both in the sixteenth century—had managed to take a Spanish treasure galleon.

Rogers sought to parlay his fame by writing a book, but met competition from one of his own officers—Edward Cooke, whose account published a few months before Rogers’s A Cruising

Voyage Around the World. Rogers’s account provides incredible insight into the complications of life and command at sea.

Woodes Rogers parlayed his fame to gain important connections in the British government, and he urged these connections to support a plan he had been developing to put an end to piracy in

Madagascar and establish a British colony in place of the notorious pirates’ nest. Some of Captain

Avery’s crew, along with other pirates, were known to be operating out of Madagascar, sitting on an important trade route between Europe and Asia. To gain more information on the Madagascar pirates, Rogers convinced the East India Company to allow him to carry slaves from Madagascar to Sumatra. When he arrived in 1714, Rogers found the “Kingdom of Pirates” to be little more than a handful of men scraping out a modest existence among the local Malagasy people and lacking any sort of organization or even a single vessel. While trading for slaves, Rogers made the acquaintance of , one of Avery’s crewmen and the de facto leader of Madagascar’s pirates. From his interactions with Collins and the others, Rogers became convinced that these men, if offered the opportunity, would return to England and live peacefully as honest men. By the

143 Bryan Little, Crusoe’s Captain (London: Odham’s Press, 1960), 149, 169; Donald Jones, Captain Woodes Rogers’ Voyage Round the World, 1708-1711 (Bristol: Bristol Branch of the Historical Association of the University, 1992), 19-21.

87 time Rogers returned to England in 1715, he thoroughly believed that Madagascar could be reformed through a carrot-and-stick approach. A year later, with alarming reports coming from governors in the Americas, Rogers’s contact in government asked him if his plan might be applied to the Bahamas.144 Rogers responded that he believed it could, and he spent much of 1717 modifying his plan before presenting it to Parliament, the Admiralty, and the King. King George I approved Rogers’s plan on September 3, 1717 and appointed him Governor of New Providence.145

Woodes Rogers’s plan involved providing incentives for reform and punishment for resistance. The Act of Grace fulfilled the incentives requirement to great effect, serving two purposes. First, many pirates took the leap into banditry out of necessity as much as by choice, such as when Hornigold and Thatch resolved to relieve their unemployment in 1713. With no options to make an honest living after Queen Anne’s War, the turn to piracy served practical concerns for survival for many sailors. Given the chance, many of these men jumped at the opportunity for their crimes to be forgiven, with the added benefit of keeping their spoils. At a time when Atlantic pirates numbered in the thousands, the Act of Grace cut their numbers in half or more, limiting the potential resistance to the empire’s reacquisition of New Providence. Second, the Act of Grace disrupted the bonds within the pirate community while clearly identifying those recalcitrant that the empire would have to punish. Those who refused to take the pardon found their support networks disrupted as former smugglers, fences, and other pirates refused to associate with the die-hards for fear of invalidating their own pardons. Further, reformed pirates could conceivably turn informant against defiant pirates, forcing the latter to seek out new haunts and question the trustworthiness of their acquaintances—it essentially undermined the bonds of trust

144 Little, Crusoe’s Captain, 172-174. 145 “Copy of Governor Rogers’ Commission” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 155-168.

88 that existed between those who sailed under the Black. When Woodes Rogers’s flotilla of Royal

Navy warships arrived in Nassau Harbor on July 24, 1718, the Act of Grace had effectively divided the pirate commonwealth into two camps: the reformed, led by Captain Benjamin Hornigold, and the die-hards who resolved to continue pirating and living as free men as long as they were able.

Hornigold’s 1716 plans to fortify Nassau failed to account for the Act of Grace—the fortifications were useless if they lacked men with the will to defend the island. In fact, the Fort itself remained in a crumbling state by 1718, as the pirate crews had more interest in whoring and carousing than in maintaining the island’s defenses. This may explain why Hornigold, the head of the Flying Gang and unofficial protector of the commonwealth, decided to join the reformers and accept Rogers as the lawful governor. He saw the writing on Fort Nassau’s crumbling walls and recognized the futility of resistance. Likely wanting to make the best of the situation, Hornigold decided to side with the new government to at least gather the lay of the new political landscape— he could always return to piracy should Rogers’s new government fail.

Governor Rogers set to work preparing to remake New Providence into a proper colony.

He ordered the residents to begin repairs on the fort and received a new wave of settlers and supplies from England. His grasp as yet tenuous, Rogers needed to solidify his control by demonstrating his authority, but before he could do so, he received bad news. First, a large collection of die-hard pirates had gathered under the command of Captain , a former associate of Henry

Jennings from the time when Jennings sailed as a privateer for Governor Hamilton in Jamaica.

Vane swore to return and enact revenge against Rogers and any who supported the new government, and it was no idle threat. He managed to secure several ships and his crew numbered in the hundreds. While coming up with a plan to deal with Vane and his followers, merchants reported that a new Spanish governor had been appointed in Havana with orders to destroy all the

English settlements in the Bahamas—the Spanish believing them all to be pirate havens—and

89 rumors put the Spanish strength at five warships and more than fifteen-hundred soldiers.

Exacerbating matters, Commodore Chamberlaine, commander of Rogers’s Royal Navy escort, announced that his three men-of-war were leaving for Port Royal well before the completion of repairs to Fort Nassau. With no legal authority over Chamberlaine or his men, Rogers could not prevent them from moving on, and with only his personal ship left to defend the island, he hand to come up with an alternative to deal with the pirate threat while he communicated with the Spanish to buy time. Like other frontier governors before him, Rogers leaned on the skills of the pirates- turned-privateers in his colony to achieve these ends. Benjamin Hornigold and the former smuggler

John Cockram agreed to become pirate hunters in pursuit of Vane and others.146 Rogers knew he was taking a massive risk in turning to the former outlaws, for if they decided to return to piracy, there was nothing he could do to stop it. At the same time, his actions portrayed trust, demonstrating to men like Hornigold that Rogers would not rescind their pardons.

Captain Hornigold proved true to his word, successfully hunting and capturing several die- hard pirates and reinforcing Rogers’s position on the island in the process. Hornigold could easily have returned to piracy, joined Vane, and very likely taken Nassau back, but perhaps he recognized that if he did so, there would be nothing to stop the Spanish fleet gathering at Havana from shattering Nassau completely. Hornigold became a pirate in 1713 to address pragmatic concerns of unemployment in the wake of Queen Anne’s War, and pragmatic concerns again pushed him to support Governor Rogers and defend British interests. In this way, Benjamin Hornigold represented the opportunism of many sailors on the frontier. Idealists like Bellamy and Vane, raging as they did against the system, were more likely than not to meet tragic ends. Pragmatists

146 “Rogers to the Council of Trade and Plantations, 31 October 1718,” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 359-381.

90 like Hornigold could find profit both inside and outside the system, and many recognized it was time to return to legality.

His faith in Hornigold rewarded, Rogers moved on to complete his plan to control New

Providence. His pirate hunters captured ten pirates who refused to take the pardon, and Rogers intended to use their trial and execution to gauge the sentiment of Nassau’s population, who had profited from the pirates since 1714. If the Bahamians still harbored pirate sympathies, they would make trouble at the execution. Rogers ensured fair and public trials, which determined that one of the ten men had been forced into piracy—he was subsequently acquitted. The court found the remaining nine guilty and sentenced them to death by hanging. Rogers pardoned one to demonstrate compassion for a fellow Bristol man. Two days later, in front of a crowd of hundreds beneath the walls of Fort Nassau, the execution took place under heavy guard. The condemned gave their final words, some calling for the crowd to rise up against the British and free them, but the Bahamians merely watched as Rogers gave the order and the eight pirates hung from the gallows.147 His plan had worked. The Act of Grace broke the pirates’ unity while reincorporating those who had a mind to reform, and the public execution served as a demonstration of the state’s power. As a bonus, Rogers’s execution of the pirates convinced the Spanish governor in Havana that Nassau was no longer a pirate’s nest, granting New Providence a reprieve from Spanish invasion. The pirate commonwealth in Nassau was no more, but the most notorious pirate in the

Atlantic remained at large.

Like Hornigold, Blackbeard recognized the significant changes the Act of Grace would bring to the pirate community, and he set out to implement his own plans for dealing with the changing political landscape. Thatch knew that most of his crew would not accept the pardons, so

147 Woodes Rogers, “Governor Rogers to Mr. Secretary Craggs,” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 424-446.

91 he conspired with a handful of his men to intentionally ground the Queen Anne’s Revenge and abandon the radical elements of his crew on the North Carolina shore. Thatch then sought to establish a mutually-beneficial relationship with North Carolina’s governor, Charles Eden.

Governor Eden apparently found Blackbeard’s proposal satisfactory as he issued pardons to Thatch and his men and allowed them to settle down in Bath Town to build homes and live what appeared to be honest lives.148 Blackbeard had no intention of giving up piracy, however, and by August

1718, he set out to sea once more. On September 24, Blackbeard returned to North Carolina with a French vessel in tow, swearing under oath to Governor Eden that he had found it at sea, unmanned, and taken it for salvage. When a notorious pirate claims to have “found” a vessel floating in the middle of the ocean, filled with valuables and sufficiently seaworthy to be sailed back to North Carolina, most would suspect that the pirate had done more than salvage the vessel, but apparently Eden and Blackbeard had reached an understanding as the governor condemned the vessel and awarded it to Thatch.149 Blackbeard seemed to have found a way to take the pardon— marking the end of his terror campaign against English shipping—but found a way to continue pirating with the assistance of a helpful British governor. Unfortunately for Thatch and his men, another governor sensed opportunity.

Corruption’s Wages: The Murder of Edward Thatch

Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia found himself in embroiled in political scandal in 1718. The Virginia legislature accused him of fostering a culture of corruption, had successfully petitioned the king to repeal Spotswood’s regulations, and was in the process of working to remove

148 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 255-259. 149 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 280.

92 him from office.150 Spotswood needed a distraction, preferably something that would put him in good standing with the crown. The presence of the notorious pirate Blackbeard and his men in the neighboring colony of North Carolina seemed to present Spotswood with just such an opportunity.

What better way to prove his worth to the king—who was obviously concerned about the spread of piracy—than to capture or kill the most notorious pirate on the Atlantic seaboard?

Governor Spotswood approached Captain Ellis Brand of the HMS Lyme and Captain

George Gordon of the HMS Pearl in a secret meeting to discuss his plans, which he did not disclose to any other members of Virginia’s government, citing potential pirate sympathizers in the legislature.151 Knowing that Blackbeard split his time between Bath Town and Ocracoke inlet,

Spotswood suggested the captains split their forces. Captain Brand, as the senior officer, would travel overland with a contingent of marines while Gordon would sail on Ocracoke to ensure that no pirates escaped into the Atlantic. Because the Lyme and Pearl were both too large to navigate

Ocracoke’s waters, Spotswood proposed to outfit the expedition with two of his own ships, which would be commanded by Gordon’s first officer, Lieutenant . For their part, the officers would receive any spoils they found in Blackbeard’s possession and a cash bounty for the capture of pirates.152 The officers agreed to the governor’s plan, likely anticipating the riches they would discover in Blackbeard’s possession and the glory they would receive as the men to bring down Blackbeard. The plan was daring and potentially profitable. It was also illegal.

150 “Address of House of Burgesses of Virginia to the King, 27th May, 1718” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 381-397. 151 “Lt. Governor Spotswood to the Council of Trade and Plantations,” in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies: Volume 30, 1717-1718, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930), 424-446. 152 Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, 288-289.

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Since September 1718, Edward Thatch had been living as a private citizen of Bath Town, having received the King’s Pardon. To all outward appearances, Thatch was a lawful and upstanding citizen of North Carolina, and a friend of Governor Eden. He was certainly committing piracy, of course, but not against English, and with such discretion that Spotswood and his officers had no idea of his actions before they conducted their raid.153 Nevertheless, in late November,

Captain Brand’s troops occupied the residences of Thatch and Governor Eden in Bath Town while

Lieutenant Maynard and sixty marines approached Ocracoke Inlet and ambushed Blackbeard and his crew of twenty men. A General History of the Pyrates describes the dramatic battle that followed, describing a scene that would inspire pirate fictions for centuries, with the dashing young navy lieutenant squaring off with the notorious pirate captain.154 Badly outnumbered and caught by surprise, Blackbeard’s men were quickly overrun by the marines. Blackbeard himself fell after a series of mortal blows. Maynard had the pirate’s head severed and hung up in the rigging of his ship as a gruesome trophy while rounding up the survivors for transport back to Williamsburg to stand trial for piracy.

Blackbeard’s continued piracies came to light after the raid, with contraband goods seized in both Bath Town and Ocracoke. Captains Gordon and Brand split the relatively paltry sum of

£2,238 worth of goods seized from Blackbeard’s property, allotting only £1 to each of the men who fought in the battle. A council of governors exonerated Charles Eden of any wrongdoing, though his reputation never recovered. Alexander Spotswood had Blackbeard’s severed head mounted near the Hampton River in imitation of the ghoulish displays on the Thames, but if he believed this raid would salvage his reputation and political career, the governor was quickly disappointed.

153 Spotswood’s correspondence only mentions the likelihood of Thatch’s continued piracy after the Ocracoke raid took place. 154 Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, 83-84.

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Rather than distracting his political enemies, the raid highlighted Spotswood’s willingness to go outside the law. He ordered troops into North Carolina, where he had no jurisdiction, to murder and arrest men who had committed no known crime—their known piracies having been pardoned.

King George removed Spotswood from office, but allowed him to retire to his 45,000-acre estate in Virginia.

The Empire Strikes Back: The End of English Piracy in the Periphery

Blackbeard’s death and the restoration of New Providence colony effectively put an end to the Golden Age of Atlantic Piracy. Other pirates would continue to haunt the Atlantic into the

1720s and beyond, but they would never again enjoy the combination of factors that made Nassau into a pirate haven between 1713 and 1718. Men like —Black Bart— terrorized their way across the Atlantic seaboard, but failing to find friendly harbors, these pirates survived only through continuous robberies, making for relatively short careers.155 By the , almost no piracy existed at all in the Atlantic, and by the mid-nineteenth century, it was entirely extinct. The frontier economies of Britain’s American colonies matured throughout the eighteenth century and no longer relied on smugglers, privateers, and pirates to shore up their economies or for defense. But they held on to a sense of liberty developed through decades of self-reliance imposed by their frontier status. These communities resented and resisted imperial governance, not in the same manner as Black Sam Bellamy and his war against the system, but they resisted all the same in ways that would come to a head in the latter half of the century.

The British Empire owed a great debt to pirates by the eighteenth century. Men like

Hawkins, Drake, and Morgan helped ensure that there was an empire at all, and these pirates—for privateers were still pirates—received honors according to their contributions. But by the

155 Chet, The Ocean is a Wilderness, 92-94.

95 eighteenth century, the need for a Francis Drake was far less, as evidenced by the relatively demure reception of Woodes Rogers’s capture of the Incarnación compared to Drake’s capture of the

Cacafuego. Henry Avery’s robbery of the Ganj-i-sawai in the Indian Ocean, and the outrage it generated in Mughal India, demonstrated that pirates could do far more harm to the empire than good. That such piracies were conducted by momentarily disaffected sailors and facilitated by corrupt frontier officials demonstrated to the powerful in Whitehall the need for stronger, centralized control of the empire and improved economic stability. Colonial governors’ use of privateers and private navies had to be curbed, and colonial economies had to be more effectively tied to the wider imperial economy. The investigations and arrests of Governors Nicholas Trott,

Archibald Hamilton, and Charles Eden served as examples to other governors, and Whitehall ensured that the men who replaced them shared the imperial vision that promoted lawful, centralized—in a word, modern—trade over that of the local, frontier patterns. The Act of Grace shattered the essential unity of the pirate commonwealth, coopted some of the most skilled pirates to the imperial cause, and subsequent arrests of corrupt government officials and executions of pirates demonstrated the authority the empire expected to wield, even in the frontiers. Thus, in an indirect way, early-eighteenth century pirates served to strengthen London’s grasp over its colonies and reinforce imperial control. The frontier zones withered as the empire asserted itself in the

Atlantic and pirates found fewer safe harbors in the Americas. Some scattered to other parts of the globe where local conditions continued to support piracy—the East Indies, South China Sea, and

Madagascar witnessed a wave of European pirates in the eighteenth century—but most returned to civilized society. European piracy as it had been known for centuries thus seemed to fade away into the history books and literature.

Worldwide, piracy would continue, but primarily from non-European sources. The

Barbary corsairs continued to threaten merchant shipping in the Mediterranean and the Maratha

96 pirates on the Malabar Coast of India made a particular nuisance for East India Company merchants. The most formidable outbreak of pirates occurred in the South China Sea in the early nineteenth century, when China’s coastal fleet fell into disarray at the same time that strong pirate leaders managed to unite various bands under a single banner and obtain the support of coastal villages.156 But modern images of piracy do not depict Mrs. Cheng in the South China Sea or members of the Angria family from India’s Malabar Coast. They come from Daniel Defoe, Lord

Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson, and , the anonymous author of A General

History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. These works were so foundational to the legacy of piracy precisely because of the culture in which they originated.

English pirates may have dwindled on the high seas, but their stories and actions continued to shape contemporary mentalities in the West. Their legacy also continued to influence the shape of empire.

156 Yung-lun Yüan, History of the Pirates who Infested the China Sea, from 1807 to 1810, trans. Charles Friedrich Neumann (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1831), 3-17.

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Chapter 4

CONCLUSIONS: IMPERIAL PIRACY AND WESTERN HEGEMONY

Persistent Resistance: Late-Eighteenth Century Context

Following the breakup of the pirate nest in Nassau, the British Empire took steps to formalize centralized control and to monopolize violence to the Royal Navy and British Army. In many ways, their efforts bore fruit. Piracy and other forms of now-delegitimized commerce and violence served to cement imperial control. Anti-piracy officials could thus present the contest for control of the colonies and maritime networks as one of law and order against crime and chaos— as, essentially, an issue of civilization versus barbarism.157 The Crown selected colonial governors who supported this framework, and through these governors, worked to ensure that whenever military action was required, it would be the Royal Navy and British Army answering the call. Yet, despite the central government’s attempts to extend its jurisdiction throughout the empire, many of these attempts continued to meet resistance along the frontiers.

With a larger professional military to call upon in times of war, British colonies were less reliant on privateers for defense and supporting their economy, but these dangers could linger beyond wartime, leaving the colonies exposed to potentially hostile forces while the military moved on. For example, when tensions between Britain and Spain boiled over in 1726, the British sent the Royal Navy—rather than privateers—to blockade Porto Bello, but when the navy left the

Caribbean in 1729, British colonists still had to deal with an incensed Spanish guardas costas, which subsequently disrupted local shipping. Similarly, New England settlers had to deal with lasting tensions with Wabanaki natives well after King George’s War ended in 1748. Indeed, the

British Empire found itself at war in the eighteenth century more often than not as it continued to

157 Chet, The Ocean is a Wilderness, 3.

98 struggle with France and Spain for European primacy, and in 1754, Britain’s struggle to solidify control over disputed territories with France resulted in the largest war yet, with global implications. The Seven Years’ War between Britain and France saw fighting in five continents and resulted in Britain achieving European primacy and evicting the French from India and North

America. The sheer scale of the war gave British merchants in the Atlantic the best opportunity for privateering since Queen Anne’s War at the beginning of the century. Thousands of sailors once again acquired the skills of armed mercantilism. The war also nearly bankrupted the British treasury, forcing the empire to turn the screws on its colonies to make up the difference.

Seeking to make up a shortfall in colonial revenue caused by salutary neglect—the lax enforcement of trade regulations in the colonies as long as colonial commerce proved generally profitable—the British government renewed efforts to generate revenue through trade restrictions.

Parliament issued the Sugar Act of 1764 and Stamp Act of 1765 in the hopes of raising revenue.

Instead, this legislation led to widespread resistance in the American colonies, who resented such taxation without representation.158 Colonials turned to smuggling to bypass the taxes, and the outcry against Parliament’s intrusion into colonial affairs was so strong that Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766 but simultaneously reminded the colonials that they reserved the right to make laws binding on the American colonies “in all cases whatsoever” through the Declaratory

Act of 1766.159 The Townshend Acts of 1767 reinforced colonial resistance and contributed to alienating the American colonies.

158 Chris Beneke, “The Critical Turn: Jonathan Mayhew, the British Empire, and the Idea of Resistance in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Boston,” Massachusetts Historical Review 10 (2008): 42. 159 An Act for the better securing the Dependency of His Majesty’s Dominions in America upon the Crown and Parliament of Great Britain 1766, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1766.

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Oriental Enterprise: Extending Imperial Control in Asia

At about the same time Parliament sought to force its control on the resistant American colonies, the British East India Company was making significant inroads into India by employing private armies and taking advantages of divisions between Indian rulers. By 1767, the company controlled most of Bengal directly, giving it direct access to the productive and fertile regions around the Ganges River. But the real prize in Asia remained China, whose teas, silks, and porcelains commanded immense profits in Europe and elsewhere. But dealing with China proved difficult and costly for the East India Company. European traders were restricted to Canton, where they were subjected to Chinese laws and to enormous fees and taxes for the privilege of trading— one of the main complaints East India Company merchants leveled against the Chinese, and an irony given Parliament’s injunctions on the American colonies. Making matters worse, the Chinese had little desire for European products and often insisted on bullion payments, creating a massive trade imbalance between Britain and China. The trade was profitable, but the British sought ways to make it even more profitable, and once again, a convergence of factors created an opportunity for the British to exploit.

The opium trade in the Indian Ocean dates at least back to the sixth or seventh century, well before Europeans came to dominate Asian maritime trade. It was first referenced in a Chinese medical manual in the first half of the eighth century.160 But as medicine for the relief of tension and pain, it was never transported in significant quantities or exceptionally profitable. In the seventeenth century, however, as the practice of smoking tobacco gained popularity worldwide.

Many began adding a bit of opium to their tobacco, and soon the Chinese were smoking opium without any tobacco. Its strong addictive nature, when smoked, ensured a growing demand for the

160 Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China (London: Pan Macmillan, 2011), 21.

100 product.161 By 1773, the British East India Company realized that it could use its territories in India to efficiently mass-produce a product whose sales would only increase its demand.162 The opium trade as a medicine was nothing to get excited about, but as a recreational drug, it promised the potential to reduce and possibly even reverse the trade imbalance with China. There was only one problem for the British East India Company in the 1770s: the sale and smoking of opium had been outlawed in China since 1729.

The Company found that the most effective way of making opium profitable required specific steps. First, it necessitated a monopoly on opium cultivation, allowing the Company to fix the price of the opium they purchased from local producers in Bengal, with a continuous exploration of finding the lowest possible price. To encourage production, company agents advanced loans of credit to local growers and entered into treaties with local rulers that ensured the latter would encourage the former to take part in poppy cultivation. Opium harvests would then be collected at company factories, where the product would be processed and packaged before going to auction in Calcutta. To avoid potential political complications, the British East India Company then sold chests of opium, at enormous markups, to private merchants who then smuggled the drug into China, often through the use of corrupt officials.163 In short, the East India Company utilized military force to acquire Indian lands which it then exploited to produce a cash crop that they could sell to smugglers in much the same way that British officials issued letters of marque to privateers, only the Company was guaranteed to receive its “share” at the beginning of the transaction. And just as privateers allowed the Crown to avoid political complications in the sixteenth century, the

161 Lovell, The Opium War, 36. 162 P.J. Marshall, Bengal: The British Bridgehead, Eastern India 1740-1828, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 180-182. 163 “Affairs of the East India Company: Minutes of evidence, 26 February 1830,” in Journal of the House of Lords: Volume 62, 1830 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office), 925-931.

101 use of smugglers allowed the Company to avoid the same in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As long as the East India Company retained its monopoly on the opium trade, it promised to continue to grow as a share of the “China Trade” and return enormous profits to a cash-strapped

British treasury through a modern version corporate privateering.

Losing the Frontier: The American Colonies and the War for Independence

But while London reaped the profits of the British East India Company, Parliament and

King George III continued to press centralized control of the colonies. The Townshend Acts of

1767 met fierce resistance throughout the colonies with vocal protests, demonstrations, and violence. London decided that a measure of discipline had to be restored, and British Army regulars were sent to the center of the most vocal American resistance in Boston, resulting in the Boston

Massacre of 1770. Americans responded to imperial discipline with embargos on British goods, which resisted the taxes, hurt East India Company profits, and simultaneously supported local smugglers.164 In 1773, American demonstrators boarded three merchant vessels in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 boxes of East India Company tea worth approximately £9,000 into the water in a daring act of resistance that also likely happened to prove quite beneficial to American smugglers.165 In response, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts in an escalating struggle between imperial discipline and colonial resistance. By 1775, with the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the American War for Independence had begun.

At first glance, it appeared that Britain would have little difficulty in putting down the rebellious colonies, but for Britain, the war was chiefly a financial affair. The Royal Navy boasted

164 Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1979), 6. 165 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 72-73.

102 overwhelming superiority to its nascent American counterpart, which it employed to great effect in suppressing American shipping. But as long as the war lasted, it undermined British commerce throughout the empire. The American colonies represented consumer markets that British merchants needed. Making matters worse, to offset the naval imbalance, the Americans employed a massive number of privateers to strike directly at British commerce. American merchantmen gained significant experience as privateers during the , and the recent troubles with Great Britain made them adept smugglers. Utilizing their smaller ships to evade

British ships of the line, American privateers raided British shipping and secured supplies vital to the American war effort. This privateering was only possible thanks to Robert Morris, a

Philadelphia delegate to the Continental Congress and successful businessman with both the fiscal acumen and maritime connections to subsidize the American privateering effort.166 Morris oversaw the issuance of approximately eight-hundred privateering commissions throughout the war, netting the capture or destruction of nearly six-hundred British merchant ships, and causing approximately

£1,480,000 in damage.167 With the entrance of the French—and to a lesser extent the Spanish and

Dutch—in the war in 1778, with no way of cutting off the local support of American privateers, and with British merchants and insurance companies worried about continued predation on shipping and depressed commerce, the British eventually realized that they could not win the war or hope to recoup their costs. In 1783, they conceded the independence of the .

The American Revolutionary War resulted in the loss of the thirteen colonies, but Britain retained its maritime primacy, and commercial trade between Britain and the former colonies soon

166 Eric Jay Dolin, When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 6-8. 167 John Frayler, Salem Maritime National Historic Site, “Privateers in the American Revolution,” The American Revolution, National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, last modified December 4, 2008, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.nps.gov/revwar/about_the_revolution/privateers.html.

103 resumed, often on British terms. But the new American nation also represented potential competition for British business interests throughout the world as the Americans were no longer bound to respect British monopolies. But as long as the Americans remained poor and bereft of a navy, the threat of such competition remained small. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, conditions began to change.

Lessons Learned: The China Trade and Celestial Authority

American commerce in the early nineteenth century, like the commerce of the rest of the world, focused on establishing trade with China and dealing in its valuable teas, silks, porcelains, and other products. And like the rest of the world, American merchants soon discovered that China had little interest in trading for anything other than silver, which the Americans lacked, forcing them to pay high premiums or undertake complicated voyages to Southern Europe and Latin

America to amass the necessary specie.168 As soon as the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, Robert

Morris—the Founding Father who organized American privateering efforts during the war— invested in the Empress of China, the first American vessel to trade in Canton under the flag of the

United States. The Empress of China arrived in August 1784 with a cargo full of silver specie and ginseng, a difficult-to-gather root that grew in the wild forests of New England that the French discovered fetched a good price in China.169 Before the Americans could complete their trading, however, they received a lesson.

On November 24, the British merchant ship Lady Hughes—one of the “countrymen” or private vessels licensed by the British East India Company to conduct trade between Calcutta and

Canton—fired its cannons in salutation to party guests at the end of the evening while at anchor off

168 Jacques M. Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade, 1800-1840”, The Business History Review 42.4 (1968): 419. 169 Dolin, When America First Met China, 14-16.

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Canton. Such salutes were usually fired with powder and wadding only, but on this occasion, the cannons were live. A cannonball tore through a local Chinese vessel, wounding two and killing one. Chinese officials demanded the gunner be handed over to local authorities. The British refused, arguing that while the incident was indeed unfortunate, the gunner was a British citizen on a British ship and therefore not subject to local laws. The Chinese governor, Sun Shiyi, locked down the port and arrested George Smith, the supercargo for the Lady Hughes. The Chinese refused to allow any British ships to leave, not just the Lady Hughes, putting enormous economic pressure on the British to comply with Chinese demands. The chief Western merchants sent guards to their factories, fearing that their goods would be seized, and held councils to discuss what was to be done about the matter. Governor Sun Shiyi issued these merchants a letter:

A Native of this Country having been killed by a Gun fired from [the Lady Hughes], whether by accident or design it is necessary that this Man should appear before me for examination that he may be tried comformably to our Laws: Three days are now elapsed, & you have not sent me this Gunner which denotes on your part a resistance to our Laws; nevertheless, Mr. Smith who is detained in the City is very prudent & descreet, he has consented to write to Whampoa to demand this Gunner that he may appear before our Tribunal & I can return Mr. Smith to you as soon as this Gunner shall arrive; I exhort you therefore to remain quiet & conform yourselves to my Mandate, & shew no token of resistance… [and] if you dare in our Country to disobey & infringe our Laws, consider well that you may not repent when it is too late.170

The Chinese did not want to end trade with the West for it was beneficial to both parties, but they could not allow foreigners to set the terms of that trade or to be exempt from Chinese laws. China’s government was based upon Confucian ideals of paternalism. Everyone had to conform to the authority of the Emperor, even foreigners, and in return the Emperor would rule in a benevolent manner befitting the benefit of all. To western perceptions, where the British and Americans

170 Li Chen, “Law, Empire, and Historiography of Modern Sino-Western Relations: A Case Study of the Lady Hughes Controversy in 1784”, Law and History Review 27.1 (2009): 21. East India Company Factory Records, IOR/G/12/79/1784-85: 124. Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 99-105.

105 cherished Enlightenment conceptions of liberty, Chinese authority seemed like little more than tyranny. But there was no way around it. On November 30, 1784, the captain of the Lady Hughes delivered his gunner to Governor Sun Shiyi in exchange for Mr. Smith, and on December 6, the governor lifted the embargo. The gunner was later found guilty of murder by a Chinese court and subsequently strangled to death. Western merchants believed a travesty of justice had taken place.

They believed the incident was an honest accident, resented being held collectively responsible for the gunner’s actions, and begrudged the Chinese tactic of hostage taking.171 But in 1784, if the

West wanted to legally trade with China, it had to do so on Chinese terms. That meant respecting

Chinese authority and paying in silver. At least for the time being.

Limiting the Competition: The Turkey Trade and the Barbary States

By 1785, the opium trade made up as much as fifteen percent of all East India Company revenues, and that share was growing. As Chinese demand for European goods diminished, the

British sought an alternative to expensive silver bullion to conduct business in China. East India

Company factories produced opium in India, sold it at auction to private merchants specifically licensed for the purpose, who then sold it to Chinese smugglers and dealers in exchange for silver, which the merchants used to purchase Chinese products at Canton. This process seemed to reflect the basic principles of Adam Smith’s interpretation of profiting through free trade and generating beneficial capital.172 Opium thus became the preferred British “coin of exchange” in the China

Trade.173 And the Americans soon followed suit.

171 Dolin, When America First Met China, 82-84. 172 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Ladeli, 1776). 173 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

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American merchants had little or no chance of obtaining an East India Company license to trade between India and China. They had to find an alternative source for the drug. As early as the

1790s, the Ottoman port city of Smyrna (modern Izmir) offered just such an alternative. Turkish opium was produced a few days’ journey overland to the east of Smyrna and could be purchased by anyone in good standing with the Ottomans, including Americans. American vessels soon began sailing across the Mediterranean, purchasing cargos of opium at Smyrna, and then setting out for

China. This became known as the Turkey Trade, and while it never reached the levels of Indian opium production—the American trade in Turkish opium only ever amounted to ten percent of the total opium trade with China—this represented a threat to the interests of the British East India

Company and its influential contacts in London. The British were not interested in going to war with the United States over the Turkey Trade, but they had other options to curb American competition: .

Piracy Politics: The First American-Barbary War

Figure 8: The Barbary Coast. Richard William Seale, A correct Chart of the Mediterranean Sea, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Levant (1745), Geographicus. Modified by author to point out specific locations mentioned within text.

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Corsairs had been operating in the Mediterranean since at least the time of the Crusades, with both Muslim and Christian crews raiding each other for goods, slaves, and ransom as an extension of regional warfare dating back nearly a millennium by the turn of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, it was this continuous Mediterranean raiding that helped develop the form of armed mercantilism Europeans exported worldwide in the sixteenth century. Christopher Columbus was himself a Mediterranean corsair, raiding Venetian and Muslim shipping in the Mediterranean in the context of the closing days of the Crusades, and conditions in the Mediterranean had not changed too much by 1783. The Barbary States consisted of a collection of city-states that controlled sections of the North African Coast and owed a loose allegiance to the . As long as the rulers of , , and continued to send tribute to Constantinople, the

Ottomans allowed them to rule and provided them with the protection of the Ottoman Empire. The

Barbary States and their corsairs—who operated in much the same way as privateers—terrorized

European shipping, including British, throughout the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. In 1625, Moroccan raiders captured a British ship and sold its crew into slavery. In the 1670s, England went to war with Algiers and several New York merchants found themselves captives of the Algerian Dey (lord) until their hometown church could raise their ransom and secure their return.174 England eventually secured peace with Algiers in

1686, finding it worthwhile to pay Algiers and the other Barbary States to leave English shipping alone, and until 1783, American merchants received the same protection.

The Barbary States’ naval power failed to keep pace with the European powerhouses in

Britain, France, and Holland, and by the late-eighteenth century, they represented a threat only to the weaker European nations, including the newly independent United States. European nations

174 Robert J. Allison, Narratives of Barbary Captivity: Recollections of James Leander Cathcart, Jonathan Cowdery, and William Ray (Genoa, IL: Lakeside Press, 2007), xxviii.

108 who could afford to do so paid the Barbary States to hold their rivals in check. And in 1783, with the conclusion of the Treaty of Paris, the British consul to Algiers alerted the Algerians to the possibility of seizing American ships. By August of that year, Algerian corsairs captured two small schooners, the Maria and Dauphin, along with twenty-one American sailors. The Algerians had the captains of these vessels write to and —then serving as diplomats in France and Holland—informing the American government of their captivity.175 News of the captures and rumors of others drove up insurance rates so precipitously that many American merchants were forced to contract with British carriers to ship their merchandise in the

Mediterranean. Americans involved in the early Turkey Trade were forced to consign their goods to the British Levant Company, sacrificing a portion of their projected profits for the protection of the British flag.176 And while Congress deliberated over what to do about the Barbary States, the crews of the Maria and Dauphin remained in captivity for more than a decade. The situation grew more urgent when, in 1793, Algerian corsairs captured eleven more ships and more than one- hundred sailors and passengers. The Americans found themselves in a difficult situation, not unlike the situation faced by the British in the War of American Independence: how to deal with pirates across the Atlantic who threatened American commerce and enjoyed the support of friendly ports?

Paying ransom would only encourage more piracy, even though it was a necessary step to secure the release of American prisoners in Algiers. Paying tribute was an indefinite solution and costly, though it would serve in the short term to keep American shipping in the Mediterranean safe, if less profitable. Thomas Jefferson and others began to push for a military solution.

Privateers would not serve, as the smaller merchant vessels that had been so successful at evading the Royal Navy in the American Revolution were precisely the vessels upon which the corsairs

175 Allison, Narratives of Barbary Captivity, xxxi-xxxii. 176 Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade”, 421.

109 preyed. If the United States wanted to protect its economic interests in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, it would need a standing navy, which Congress authorized in 1794.177

In 1801, Yusuf Qaramanli, the Pasha of Tripoli declared war on the United States in an effort to secure larger tribute payments by threatening American commerce. Qaramanli’s gamble failed, however, when U.S. Navy frigates began blockading the port of Tripoli and escorting

American merchantmen across the Mediterranean. The American navy was still small by European standards, but its new forty-four-gun frigates were more than a match for anything the Tripolitan corsairs could put afloat. Although unable to lock down the port of Tripoli completely, the

Americans successfully kept the corsairs from threatening shipping. By 1804, American merchantmen began engaging in the Turkey Trade in quantity in their own vessels.178 In 1805, threatened by an American-backed effort at regime change, Pasha Qaramanli sued for peace, bringing an end to the First American-Barbary War. Britain’s efforts to use the Barbary corsairs to discourage American competition worked for a time, but a combination of pragmatic diplomacy and cutting-edge military technology allowed the Americans to overcome this obstacle and provide the British with a measure of competition in the opium trade.

Arriving at an Accord: Gunboats, Cartels, and the Triumph of Free Trade

Increased American commerce in the opium trade attracted the attention of East India

Company Select Committee in Canton as early as 1807, but the relatively small amounts being smuggled by the Americans failed to alarm the British at the time.179 The paused the

177 “, 1801-1805 and 1815-1816”, Office of the Historian, United States Department of State, accessed October 24, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1801-1829/barbary-wars 178 Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade”, 421. 179 William Foster, “Review: The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635- 1834,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 3 (1926): 575-577. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25221046.

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Turkey Trade and significantly curtailed the China Trade in general as the scale of the conflict kept

American and British merchants fully occupied. The Algerians and Tripolitans had once again declared war on the United States and begun to raid American shipping in 1812, but after the Treaty of Ghent, a show of force from a large contingent of modern American ships built during the war with Britain was all that was required to bring both Barbary powers to heel once more. In 1815, both the Americans and British resumed the opium trade and found the Chinese more than willing to buy all the crates that the Westerners could supply. Thus British and American merchants, supported as they were by their governments and supposedly representing the height of Western

Civilization, behaved much like those merchants whose efforts supported the piracies of John

Hawkins and Ben Hornigold, demonstrating once again the West’s selective morality and hypocrisy. The opium trade did not yet amount to national piracy, but it was close. Incidents with a concerned Chinese government, and involving actual pirates, would bring matters to head.

Chinese officials renewed efforts to curb smuggling in 1815 and 1816 by attempting to suppress local Chinese dealers.180 And in 1817, Chinese pirates seized the Wabash, an American opium trader out of Baltimore, killed several of the crew, and made away with $7,000 in specie and thirty-five chests of Turkish opium. The American consul reported the incident to his Chinese counterparts and the pirates were quickly captured. The Chinese returned the silver but balked at

American demands for reparations for the opium cargo.181 And in September 1821, conflicts between American merchants and Chinese officials came to a head in the Emily incident, which paralleled the British Lady Hughes incident of 1784. After an argument with a local peddler, one

180 Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade”, 425. William Law, “Law to Byrnes & Harrison, December 22, 1816,” William Law Papers, New York Public Library. 181 Wilcocks, “Wilcocks to Secretary of State, September 22, 1817,” Despatches from Consuls in Canton, I; and H.B. Morse, Chronicles of East India Company, Vol. 3 (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1926), 318-320.

111 of the sailors on the Emily—which had been selling a cargo of opium over the previous four months while anchored in Whampoa—threw a jar at the woman, knocking her into the water where she subsequently drowned. Chinese authorities demanded the sailor for trial, but like the British before them, the Americans resisted on the grounds that as Americans on an American vessel, they should not be subject to Chinese laws. As before, the Chinese cut off all American trade, putting enormous pressure on the Emily’s captain to hand over his man, which he did. The sailor was strangled, and a subsequent Chinese investigation forced a local bribe-collector to confess the names of merchants and ships, quantities of opium, and the methods by which the illegal trade was conducted. The

Emily was on that list and was subsequently ordered to leave Canton without a homeward cargo.182

Ironically enough, the Emily incident bound East India Company merchants and their American counterparts in common cause under the auspices of Free Trade. No longer would they see each other as competitors, but rather as partners in a common enterprise—as a cartel. It also forced

Westerners and their Chinese partners to adopt a new system for the smuggling of opium. The

Lintin system was remarkably elegant, taking advantages of superior Western technology, flaws in

Chinese law enforcement, and human greed.

Under the Lintin system, opium traders would stop on their way to Whampoa at Lintin, a designated transfer point at the mouth of the river, and unload their opium cargos onto a storeship before proceeding up-river. Chinese smugglers would buy opium chits at the factories in Canton, paying in silver and would then present these chits at Lintin along with a cumsha or bribe—usually

$5 per chest—to support the floating warehouse operations. This system eliminated the need for merchants to interact directly with buyers or officials as well as the need to deliver their cargos to shore. Everything was relatively anonymous and automatic, and it leveraged the West’s advantage

182 Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade”, 427-428.

112 in naval firepower for protection of cargos and transactions, for the British and American merchant vessels could easily out-maneuver and out-shoot any vessels the Chinese could put in the water by

1821.183 With such a system in place, opium smuggling returned enormous profits for all sellers every year until 1838. That year, the Daoguang emperor grew alarmed at the widespread nature of opium use in his empire when one of the royal princes was caught smoking opium in the Forbidden

City. Worse, that same year officials in Tianjin, the port that supplied the capital with most of its goods and provisions, seized a large shipment of opium from Cantonese smugglers. Combined with the significant drain of China’s silver reserves as a result of the trade, these incidents convinced the Dauguang emperor to stamp out the opium trade at its source in Canton.184 To accomplish this task, the emperor selected Viceroy Lin Zexu.

The viceroy cracked down on the Hong merchants and drug dealers—by now a familiar practice in Chinese anti-opium efforts—but to these tactics he added the requirement for all merchants in Canton in 1839 to surrender any and all opium in their cargos if they ever wished to do business in China again. Western merchants were horrified. Lin Zexu’s demands represented a climactic clash of civilizations between China and the West.185 Chinese authorities believed the confiscation to be a benevolent, paternal act of corrective instruction to a group of stubborn trade partners who refused to follow the rules. China did not want to cut off trade with the West; they wanted to correct the West’s lack of proper etiquette in much the same way as a parent corrects a child. For western merchants, however, the seizure and destruction of property represented the actions of a tyrannical Chinese government in opposition to the principles of Free Trade—

183 Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade”, 428. 184 Lovell, The Opium War, 53-54. 185 Samuel Huntington defines this as “culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, [which shape] the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict [between civilizations].” Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 20.

113 principles which the West applied hypocritically, as they were not smuggling opium to be sold in

London or New York.

With no viable options in 1839, western merchants begrudgingly complied with the

Chinese demands. Lin Zexu promptly ordered the destruction—without compensation—of approximately twenty-thousand chests of opium.186 By going after the opium smuggling at the source by way of the foreign merchants, the Chinese hoped to demonstrate that the old rules remained in effect: if one wants to do trade in China, one must respect Chinese authority.

Unfortunately for the Chinese, the British merchants had old rules of their own: any trade that cannot be affected on peaceable terms can certainly be concluded at the end of a cannon. The merchants lobbied London and convinced the British government to employ the Royal Navy, including its new steam-powered gunboats, to conduct military action against the Chinese. The

Nemesis—a fitting name for a gunship employed to support the opium trade—and the Royal Navy destroyed Chinese fleets and defensive fortifications at will throughout the , forcing the Chinese government to sign the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The British victory settled the clash of civilizations and marked the point at which the West became the dominant power in the East. Britain forced China to grant reparations for the destruction of opium in 1839, to open treaty ports throughout China where Britain could trade tax free and immune from Chinese laws, and to cede the island of Hong Kong to the British.

186 Lovell, The Opium War, 69.

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Conclusion: Conceptions Revisited

The military humiliation of China in the First Opium War marked a culminating moment for the British Empire. For over four-hundred years, China represented the crown jewel of trade and power in the Orient—an authority who demanded genuflection and business on its own terms, but also one whose commerce was worth the extravagant lengths required. For centuries,

Europeans sought ways to break into Oriental markets and the extravagant wealth they promised.

Vasco da Gama exported Mediterranean violence to the Indian Ocean, and over the next three centuries, Europeans continued to utilize violence or the threat of the same to acquire what they desired. The process began with the Portuguese conquests in Goa, Malacca, and Ormuz and it continued with the Spanish conquest of the Philippines. In turn, the Dutch and English robbed their

Iberian rivals of their possessions and entrenched European footholds in the region, but China remained an impregnable fortress, able to dictate terms to the European barbarians who viewed trade and warfare as inseparable. But the Europeans demonstrated that they were willing to take impressive risks to acquire great prizes. Just as Francis Drake took risks in raiding the Spanish treasure train in Panama and in pitting his Golden Hind against the superior firepower of the

Cacafuego to rob Spain of its wealth, Drake’s countrymen took risks in developing the opium trade and sending warships to do the same to China more than two centuries later. Thenceforth,

Europeans (and Americans) would exert hegemonic influence throughout the world, utilizing the threat of violence—and, all too often, actual violence—to impose their will on the rest of the world and take what they wanted.

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Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard, calls this process

“war capitalism.”187 In Beckert’s framing of the issue, the West created a system to divide the world into two groups, those on the “inside” and those on the “outside.”

The “inside” encompassed the laws, institutions, and customs of the mother country, where state-enforced order ruled. The “outside,” by contrast, was characterized by imperial domination, the expropriation of vast territories, decimation of indigenous peoples, theft of their resources, enslavement and the domination of vast tracts of land by private capitalists with little effective oversight by distant European states.188

Beckert’s arguments revolve around the establishment of the cotton trade, connected as it was to agricultural slave economies in the Americas, manufacturing centers in Britain, and markets in Asia and elsewhere, but the essential elements of his war capitalism hold true in this case as well, particularly with regards to the British East India Company, but also with the British Empire as a whole. Beckert’s study highlights the contradictory nature of capitalism’s early incarnation, split between an orderly and civilized “interior” and a chaotic and brutish “exterior”; between the economies of the metropole and the frontier. The story of the development of European hegemony and self-styled exceptionalism predates Beckert’s study by several centuries, but his argument yet holds true. Eurocentrism has at its roots the piratical exploits of men like Christopher Columbus,

Vasco da Gama, and Francis Drake. It can be seen in the actions of the East India Company’s hostile takeover of Portuguese trading posts protecting stolen Muslim trade routes and in the British acquisitions in the Americas and India. It can be seen again, and perhaps most poignantly, in the aftermath of the First Opium War, which began the Century of Humiliation in China as the oldest empire known to man found itself on the receiving end of war capitalism’s “outside” classification.

European exceptionalism was an idea developed to justify the separation of Europeans from the

187 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), Kindle edition. 188 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, location 1219 of 17324.

116 rest of the world; it was arrogant, hypocritical, self-serving, and an absolute fabrication intended to replace the facts of its development with useful fantasies.

In 1912, at the height of the British Empire, the famous Irish novelist and poet James Joyce spoke to an audience in Trieste, Austria-Hungary (modern Italy) about Daniel Defoe’s Robinson

Crusoe and how it captured the hubristic British attitude of his times with its demonstration of:

The manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow but effective intelligence, the sexual apathy, the practical and well-balanced religiosity, the calculating silence [of Robinson Crusoe]…. The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, cast away on a desert island, in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a knife-grinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe.189

Daniel Defoe, inspired by the exploits of William Dampier and Woodes Rogers, wrote Robinson

Crusoe in 1719, two centuries before Joyce’s remarks at Trieste, and 123 years before the Treaty of Nanking forced China to trade on British terms. Woodes Rogers had only recently secured New

Providence from the Caribbean pirates and the East India Company still kowtowed to both Mughal

India and Qing China for the right to do business. Early-eighteenth century British realities belied

Joyce’s interpretation of Defoe, with its remarkable nod towards the superiority of Anglo-Saxons; yet, such misplaced Eurocentric explanations not only dominated the nineteenth century, they would continue throughout most of the twentieth century as well, despite all evidence to the contrary. Joyce’s interpretation of Robinson Crusoe situated the roots of white supremacy in an imagined past, where the ascendancy of the West was inevitable and thus justifying its “civilizing” exploitation of the rest of the world. To acknowledge eighteenth century European weakness relative to Asia was to undermine conceptions of superiority that developed later. Thankfully, more

189 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, and Criticism ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 323. Emphasis mine.

117 recent historiography is beginning to correct this distorted lens on the past by exploring those things

Joyce seems to only subconsciously mention in his analogy of British conquest—things like vulnerability, aggression, and robbery.

Figure 9: The British Empire in 1897. The World 1897: The British Possessions are colored Red. Cambridge University Library.

Linda Colley—in examining a late-nineteenth century map depicting Britain at the center of the world, its colonies highlighted in red or pink—points out that observers are encouraged to focus on and admire the world-wide expanse of the imperial system, not the relatively tiny islands at its core. And yet, she argues, it is precisely Britain’s size that matters, for “small is vulnerable, small is aggressive.”190 Colley’s statement can be extended to Europe as well.

It was precisely Europe’s smallness, divided nature, and location at the tail-end of Eurasian trade routes that made it vulnerable to being cut off from those trade routes in the fifteenth century.

190 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850 (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 2-12.

118

Centuries of warfare between Christians and Muslims established the conditions that made

Ottoman expansion a barrier to European trade. These centuries of warfare also prepared the

Europeans by giving them hard experience in maritime warfare. It was therefore from a position of relative weakness and aggression that the Spanish and Portuguese set out into the Atlantic and beyond in the sixteenth century as conquerors. It was from a similarly weak position that the

English turned to pirates to break into the Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins and defend English gains. Men like John Hawkins, Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, and William Dampier made the

English Empire possible. With profits from Drake’s raid, the English were able to establish and invest in the East India Company, who carried out the tradition of utilizing a mixture of force and trade into the Indian Ocean and established footholds in India, which would eventually become the crown jewel of the British Empire. These early English freebooters received significant recognition for their contributions, but as the English developed more traditional trade routes, pirates came to represent a potential threat to England’s goals.

Piracy thrived in the imperial frontier zones, where local conditions necessitated its use for economic stability and protection, but it also represented a form of resistance against the oppressions sailors faced on a daily basis. And when these sailors began to turn to piracy for their own accord, rather than for the imperial good, English pirates not only threatened imperial commerce, they demonstrated the need to evolve beyond the semi-feudal privateering relationships that produced Hawkins and Drake, which could not be well controlled. Piracy thus offered the empire the opportunity to exert centralized control and achieve a monopoly on maritime violence through the justification of ending such criminal enterprise.

The Act of Grace and Woodes Rogers’s efforts in New Providence essentially delivered a coup de grâce to independent British piracy, but the events of the early-eighteenth century failed to end localized resistance to imperial control and exploitation. The American Revolution created

119 new competition for British in the burgeoning China Trade, but again pirates offered a potential solution. The Barbary States, long in the hip pocket of the British Empire by the turn of the nineteenth century, offered an obstacle to American competition and allowed the British the time they needed to solidify their share of the market smuggling addictive opium into China. By 1815, the Chinese demand for the drug and the clash of civilizations between China and the West combined to transform the British and Americans from rivals to partners in the opium smuggling business. And just as Francis Drake reacted to the Spanish enforcement of Spanish law at San Juan de Ulúa by escalating from smuggling to outright piracy, the British Empire reacted to Chinese enforcement of Chinese law at Canton in 1839 with an escalation to piracy as well, demonstrating succinctly the deep roots of piracy in the “civilized” British Empire that would become so foundational to the modern world.

Both piracy and imperialism raise questions of perspectives and definition. Regarding definitions, the simplest conception of imperialism is one of a dominance relationship, with the empire dominating its subjects; and an elementary definition of piracy is the use or threat of force on the seas to obtain something that could not be otherwise obtained. Even at such a simple level, these terms share similarities. Just as pirates used force to obtain loot, so too did empires—just at a larger level. It makes sense, then, that these two terms would be even more closely linked in a maritime empire like Britain’s. Of course, perspectives are important as well. Empires often justify their dominance relationships through conceptions of civilization, which they often monopolized within themselves. Similarly, pirates could be justified through perspective. One nation’s privateer was necessarily another nation’s pirate, unless they sailed for no nation at all and would thus be considered a pirate by all—as hostes humani generis, enemies of all mankind. The nuances of piracy and imperialism may draw many to make useful distinctions, but when viewed from a wider

120 perspective these distinctions fall away. We are left with a perspective that blurs the lines between the two, making imperialism little more than piracy at a national level.

Understanding piracy and imperialism thus, and how the two played out in the formation of the most powerful empire in human history, can provide historians with a better understanding of both micro- and macro-scale power relationships. It can thus be useful for more than understanding the imagery on a bottle of rum or Hollywood film. A correct accounting of the past can provide a better understanding of the present and the potential implications for the future.

Pirates still exist, as do empires. Somali pirates regularly capture cargo vessels and hold their crews for ransom, providing their local communities with vital incomes. Pirates in Indonesia, the Sulu Zone, the South China Sea, off the coast of West Africa, and even in the Caribbean all operate in much the same way as the Somalis, and these relatively localized acts of piracy still represent a symbol of resistance for those who feel they are oppressed by continuing western hegemony. Similarly, while the West may have relinquished his political control in its former colonies, western financial institutions and businesses backed by the military apparatus of their metropoles continue to reign over de facto empires upon which the sun never sets. The United

States alone has between seven- and eight-hundred military installations worldwide, and military interventions on behalf of American businesses have been a common theme in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The nuanced definitional differences of piracy and imperialism over the years have allowed those in power to set the narrative and mask the nature of power dynamics in the world today—a world that is ever more connected than at any point in history. To face the challenges posed by globalization properly, therefore, we must have a proper understanding of the past. We must look beyond self-serving Eurocentric histories and seek out an honest account of the past if we are to find a way forward and seek our common fortune.

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