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Today's selection -- from Pirates: A New History, from Vikings to Somali Raiders by Peter Lehr.
“For piracy really to thrive, to grow into a lucrative business attracting even merchants and members of the nobility, more than the approval of society at large was required. What was crucial for a flourishing pirate business was at the very least 'a nod and a wink' from corrupt officials, if not the state, as had been the case for the pirates of the Middle Ages. What was different now was the rapid expansion of the various Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch and French colonial empires, which made this (semi-)official connivance even easier than before. This was mainly due to two factors: first, the now truly enormous booty that could be gained by capturing Spanish or Portuguese treasure ships laden to their gunwales with gold, silver, jewels, silk and spices, or similar treasure ships from India on Hajj (pilgrimage) to the Red Sea and back, or Chinese junks in the East and South China Seas; and, second, the vast distances between imperial centre and colonial periphery. The riches that could be gained in distant waters were worlds apart from the far more mundane booty typical of northern waters: everyday commodities such as fish, salted pork, wine, sugar and the like. Even Elizabeth I succumbed to this 'lure of easy money', as we shall see — no wonder, then, that lower ranks of officialdom did likewise. Nor was this only the case for English officialdom: Dutch and French officials also knew how to feather their nests, while many Spanish and Portuguese officials returned home immensely wealthy. For lower-level officials, this was a high-stakes game, depending on the protection they enjoyed, which might for various reasons be suddenly withdrawn when, for instance, a previously powerful backer lost favour with the Crown. For officials of higher rank, especially for governors, getting rich by taking a slice of the pirates' booty was child's play. For them, the vast distances and the poor communications between the centre of power and the peripheral colonies worked in their favour: what the governments in faraway capitals such as London, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon or The Hague decreed was one thing, and what the local officials actually did was another.
“The individual choices and attitudes of local government officials were of paramount interest to maritime raiders: if local powers were favourably inclined towards piracy, a pirate's business was greatly facilitated. The reasons for which appointed governors chose to play their own shady roles with regard to piracy vary, and cannot be reduced to personal greed. While the lazier ones simply did not care about what was going on in their areas of responsibility, many actually feared the very real danger posed by pirates much more than the wrath of a distant government. The military resources at their disposal— regular soldiers, militia and warships — were usually scant (if they existed at all), and not always a match for local pirates. For these officials, it was pretty much a matter of plata o plomo: either you take our silver (plata), or you will get our lead (plomo, in the form of bullets). Furthermore, many of the governors of remote colonies were themselves former pirates. Sir Henry Morgan, for example, ended his illustrious and colourful buccaneering career as lieutenant governor of Jamaica in the second half of the seventeenth century. These pirates-turned-pirate hunters were usually happy to issue commissions to their former comrades without asking questions — as long as a fee was paid; the governor of the French possession Petit-Goâve, Hispaniola, had a habit of providing his captains with blank commissions 'to hand out to anyone they pleased', while the governor of a West Indian island then belonging to Denmark allegedly issued impressive-looking 'privateering commissions', which were in fact only licences for hunting goats and pigs on Hispaniola.
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| The Vitalienbrüder. Piracy became endemic in the Baltic Sea in the Middle Ages because of the Victual Brothers. |
“Even in the North Sea, much nearer to European seats of power, governors or feudal lords of small coastal principalities made quick money out of issuing commissions of dubious value. For example, according to Lunsford-Poe, a 'Grave' (Duke) of Ormond in Ireland issued such a document to the Dutch privateer Jan Corneliszoon Knole in the year 1649. Knole's legitimate Dutch commission only permitted him to attack and seize the vessels of Dutch enemies; the Duke of Ormond's commission, however, entitled him to prey on ships along the coast of Dutch Zeeland, which was exactly what he did, promptly attacking and seizing a vessel from Rotterdam. Knole was far from the only privateer who stacked the cards in his favour by accepting another commission from a conveniently uninquisitive party: the more commissions one held, the broader the range of vessels one could legitimately attack. Even had they been inclined to care about legal trifles, most pirates and privateers were illiterate and could not possibly read the conditions and limitations mentioned in their commissions— which helps to explain why the Danish governor of Petit-Goâve could do such a brisk trade selling worthless hunting licences for an island not even under his control: his illiterate customers mistook these impressive-looking documents for privateering commissions.
“Against the backdrop of endemic corruption, it is unsurprising that some officials who could not simply hand out fraudulent commissions chose to cross the line in a more obvious way in order to profit from pirates. Usually, they did so by directly aiding and abetting them, as it would nowadays be called in criminal law. In the seventeenth century the aptly named Thomas Crook, justice of the peace and chief officer of Irish port of Baltimore, openly supplied pirate ships with victuals and other necessities, even entertaining their crews in his house — with the foreseeable effect that other inhabitants of the port also saw it as their right to wheel and deal with the pirates to their hearts' content. It is obvious that in this case, as in many others, the pirates and their supporters on land hailed from a society that saw piracy as a perfectly normal, honest occupation — and probably one far superior to serving a monarch or a government seen as an alien intruder into local affairs. Sir Henry Mainwaring, having himself been a successful pirate before turning pirate hunter for James I, even called Ireland 'the Nursery and Storehouse of Pirates', while his contemporary Lord Falkland, lord deputy of Ireland between 1622 and 1629, opined that Ireland's coasts were favoured by the pirates because there they were 'much more cheaply victualled, much more easily out and in, at and from sea, which lies opener with less impediments of tides and channels'.”
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author: Peter Lehr |
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title: Pirates: A New History, from Vikings to Somali Raiders
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publisher: Yale University Press |
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page(s): 78-81 |
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