Pirates

Pirates, seafarers who rob other ships by force. Piracy is robbery at sea, and is as old as seafaring itself. It was particularly prevalent in the past where seaborne commerce was abundant and its protection was inadequate or non-existent. Where nations were at war, official permission to attack shipping and ports of belligerents, and seize goods, was granted by governments to private individuals: these privateers, as they were termed, may be distinguished from mere pirates.

The Mediterranean was the home of pirates in the Ancient World, where the trade of Phoenicians through and beyond the inland sea was vulnerable. Greek and Roman historians described expeditions against well-known pirate lairs. The late medieval settlement of the North African coast, by Muslims owing only a nominal allegiance to the caliphates or the Ottoman Empire, led to organized attacks on Christian shipping both in the Mediterranean and beyond. These corsairs of the Barbary Coast, based mainly at Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and the Moorish port of Sallee (Salé in Morocco) struck terror into merchants and seamen. Some of the corsairs were renegade or captured Christians, and by 1600 many of the pirates preying on the shipping of Venice and Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) were English and Dutch: their ships were not the fast, narrow war galleys of the region, but the Atlantic round ships, which could carry heavy cannon. Members of the Christian military order the Knights of St John of Jerusalem based on Malta, were widely feared as “corsairs parading crosses”.

When Barbary corsairs appeared in the English Channel, and even attacked West Country ports—on one occasion plundering and carrying into captivity the inhabitants of Mount's Bay, Cornwall—the English authorities mounted raids in force on their bases. The “Sallee rovers”, as they were called, provoked the successful expedition of 1637 led by Admiral William Rainborow. However, the Barbary corsairs' fearsome activities were not to be ended until the early 19th-century European and United States attacks on Tripoli and Algiers, and their subsequent occupation by the French empire.

With the European discovery of the New World, and the opening up of the riches of Asia to Western commerce in the 16th and 17th centuries, pirates found new fields to conquer. Privateers, too, prospered through the rivalry of the European nations in these waters. The original colonizing powers (Spain and Portugal) faced foreign interlopers eager to obtain their share of the wealth found there. French, Dutch, and English sailors won notoriety by their daring and often lucrative exploits. The circumnavigation of the world by Sir Francis Drake (1577-1580) made an enormous profit, in which Elizabeth I herself shared. Sir John Hawkins, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others followed. As well as gold and silver from the mines of New Spain, the sugar of Portuguese Brazil was a highly prized cargo for pirates to capture and sell in European markets.

In North America and the Caribbean Sea, buccaneers (named after the hunters who grilled the smoke-cured beef known in Carib as “boucans”) brought terror to Spanish and other colonial settlements. At first merely raiders and cattle thieves, recruited by runaways from merchant ships, military expeditions, and slave plantations, they soon (after 1660) acquired bases, of which the little island of Tortue, off Hispaniola, was the best known. Later, the town of Port Royale in Jamaica was described as “the wickedest city in the world”, and New York became another centre for piracy. The swashbuckling exploits of the Welsh pirate, Sir Henry Morgan, and the Scottish-American Captain William Kidd formed the basis of many later tales of adventure. Morgan captured Panama and crossed to the Pacific Ocean; as his endeavours helped damage Great Britain's enemies he was later knighted by Charles II. Kidd, based in New York for a time, ranged widely to the west coast of Africa and to Madagascar, but ended his life, in 1701, at Execution Dock at Wapping, east London: the traditional spot for the hanging of English pirates. His body was hung in chains by the River Thames as a warning to others who might be tempted by the rewards of a freebooting life on the high seas. By then, with greater European control of the Caribbean, and standing navies patrolling the high seas, piracy was diminishing.

Piracy was never, of course, confined to Europeans or European-dominated waters. In the later Ming dynasty period, when Chinese rule was weak, the South China Sea was extremely dangerous for shipping. Japanese and Annamese-sponsored pirates scourged the coast, traded in opium and coolies, and linked up with Chinese Triad gangs inland. A pirate fleet of 1,000 ships sailed up the Yangzi River in 1659. With the expansion of foreign trade to China in the 19th century, piracy continued to flourish, until, it was reported in 1850, there were 3,000 ships off the coast of Fujian alone. The greater British naval presence thereafter, and the award of bounties for their capture, reduced the number of pirates in the China Sea, though even in modern times there have been reports of skulduggery and hijacking in these waters.