The Ocean Is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856 [1 ed.] 9781613763063, 9781625340849

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The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,

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The Ocean Is a Wilderness

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The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,

The Ocean

Is a Wilderness

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Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688–1856

Guy Chet

University of Massachusetts Press Amherst & Boston

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Copyright © 2014 by University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-62534-085-6 (paper); 084-9 (hardcover) Designed by Jack Harrison Set in Scala Printed and bound by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chet, Guy, 1968– The ocean is a wilderness : Atlantic piracy and the limits of state authority, 1688–1856 / Guy Chet. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62534-084-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62534-085-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Maritime terrorism—Atlantic Ocean.  2. Maritime terrorism—Great Britain—Prevention. 3. Maritime terrorism—United States—Prevention.  4. Piracy—Atlantic Ocean—History. 5. Smuggling—Atlantic Ocean—History.  6. Marine insurance—Great Britain—History. 7. Marine insurance—United States—History.  I. Title. HV6433.786.A786C45 2014 364.16'4—dc23 2014007780 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,

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To my wife, Erica M.

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The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.

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Henry David Thoreau

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Contents

Preface xi Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1. Atlantic Frontier: Continued Piracy through the Long Eighteenth Century  8

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2. Frustrated Aspirations: The Legal and Ethical Presumptions of the Early Modern State  27 3. Holding the Bag: The Marine Insurance Industry’s Role in Perpetuating and Combating Piracy  51 4. Smuggling: Armed Commerce and the Severe Limits of State Enforcement and Persuasion  66 Conclusion 92 Notes 101 Bibliography 133 Index 155

ix

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Preface

When reading about early modern piracy it is commonplace to come across accounts that depict the Royal Navy as an effective police force that, in the course of a generation, from the late 1690s to the 1720s, transformed the Atlantic from a wild violent frontier into a civilized locus of orderly maritime commerce. This storyline is widely accepted, which in itself enhances its credibility; it made intuitive sense to me when I started working on this project, since piracy had disappeared from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea, while continuing safely and profitably in areas not patrolled and controlled by the Royal Navy. Thus this book began as an attempt to understand and explain how the navy met the tactical challenge posed by pirate fleets and effectively suppressed the pirate trade by 1730. I imagined, therefore, an action-packed narrative (perhaps even a book that might pique the interest of a generous Hollywood producer). But I did not encounter much in the way of action when examining how the British state confronted Atlantic piracy; frustration and accommodation, rather, emerged as much more prevalent than naval confrontation. Moreover, naval policing, such as it was, took place—intermittently, unenthusiastically, and ineffectually—at port and in coastal waters, rather than on the high seas. So this book was transformed early on from a study of confrontations between naval and pirate fleets to one focused on the frustrated efforts of various state agencies—the Board of Trade, local courts and magistrates, customs agents, and even marine insurance underwriters—to change the violent, lawless nature of maritime commerce. Rather than a naval xi

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xii

P r e fa c e

or maritime history of the British Atlantic, therefore, it is an examination of the limits of both the bureaucratic reach and governmental legitimacy of the British state in the eighteenth century, especially at sea and in coastal communities. It illuminates the nature of the British state and the mercantile and legal beliefs of British subjects. This new direction of my research revealed that relatively little had been written on the public’s reaction against attempts to “civilize” the Atlantic frontier, on the difficulties and failures of the authorities to establish a new mercantile ethic, and on the persistence of piracy in the face of a state-sponsored campaign to delegitimize it. One of the methodological critiques that undergirds my approach to the study of “armed commerce” has to do with the sources on which many specialists in the field rely. Documentary sources produced by national legislatures and royal bureaucracies (such as Admiralty Court records and judgments, royal declarations, privateering commissions, and prize law) provide an inaccurate impression of the way peripheral communities managed their economic affairs, engaged in commerce, and understood concepts such as law, jurisdiction, state, and trade. I have tried to demonstrate that the stream of legislation and regulation produced by central authorities registered the frustration of central governments with the resilience of older trade customs, legal beliefs, and administrative practices. This methodological and historiographical critique has benefited from secondary research in the fields of economic and legal history. These studies have provided an intellectual framework in which to couch my own analysis, as well as a stronger evidentiary foundation for my assessment of eighteenth-century jurisprudence, on the one hand, and commercial and economic trends, on the other. While studies anchored in economic, legal, cultural, and Atlantic history share certain working definitions with naval and labor histories, they offer a different perspective on state power and maritime culture, one that sees greater continuity—both over time and across national boundaries—than abrupt and revolutionary change. This study is not a continuation of, or an elaboration on, my first book, Conquering the American Wilderness. Nevertheless, the two books share common themes: the persistence of old forms and attitudes (rather than dramatic and rapid change) and transatlantic cultural cohesion. And yet, although both highlight trends of cultural continuity across generations and oceans, they tell dramatically different stories. The first relates the

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P r e fa c e

xiii

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successful transmission of English bureaucratic and military culture to the periphery of the British Empire. The second tells of the failure of the metropolitan government’s naval, legal, and public relations efforts to extend the state’s naval power, jurisdiction, and authority beyond its coasts. It is the persistence of old forms and attitudes that explains the success story outlined in Conquering the American Wilderness and the failure of the British anti-piracy campaign detailed in The Ocean Is a Wilderness: both examine English communities wedded to traditional and accepted practices, conventions, and ideologies. In papers that I have delivered on this topic and throughout this book, I use “commerce raiding,” “maritime predation,” “armed commerce,” and “freebooting” as phrases that include both piracy and privateering, and thus avoid the murky and anachronistic boundary between the two. In the early nineteenth century, Britain and the United States outlawed the Atlantic slave trade (1807–8), designating it as a form of piracy. Since my study deals with acts of robbery at sea, it excludes this novel category of piracy. When I discuss nineteenth-century piracy, I refer exclusively to commerce raiding (acts of robbery committed against commercial vessels), rather than instances of illegal slave trafficking. The discussion and statistics on commerce raiding in chapters 1 and 3, however, do include threats to slaving vessels. In chapter 1, I cite marine insurance premiums as a gauge for risks posed by pirates to Atlantic shipping. What makes this an imprecise exercise is the haphazard nature of early modern underwriting—news of recent losses to storms or pirates, or rumors of a ship’s compromised seaworthiness, could lead to variations in rates charged to different vessels on the same route, based on the information available to the insurer at the time of contract. Moreover, commerce raiding posed a lesser risk to ships and cargoes than did poor packing, poor navigation, and bad weather. Whenever possible, therefore, I present data for the summer months (May through August), for the sake of consistency and for effective comparisons of risks associated with maritime predation, rather than seasonal “perils of the sea.” Because of the inherent limitations of the data on insurance rates, they are offered merely to corroborate other evidence for the persistence of piracy in the Atlantic throughout the “long eighteenth century.” Stability in insurance rates throughout this period

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reflects underwriters’ appreciation that no sources of risk to cargoes had been eliminated from the Atlantic in the 1720s. In this book, I discuss insurance underwriters and merchants as groups with different interests and incentives. Of course, most insurance underwriters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were themselves merchants. Selling insurance to other merchants was an ancillary financial activity, among various other commercial and financial ventures. My reason for distinguishing between merchants selling insurance and those buying insurance is to highlight the fact that by insuring cargoes a merchant-underwriter absorbed the risks associated with shipping, whereas a merchant buying insurance relieved himself of these risks. The distinction between insurers and their customers became clearer with the emergence of insurance firms, which represented the transition of insurance underwriting into a business in its own right. This development shaped the American insurance market from its inception in the early eighteenth century, but was a significant one in the British market as well. When referring to naval vessels, I habitually use the generic term “warship,” rather than sub-classifications of battleship, cruiser, and small warship. Indeed, until 1680 all English warships were listed together, without division into classes. Battleships were ships of the line (of the battle-line, that is), meaning ships mounted with at least fifty heavy guns, which allowed them to be effective in a major artillery battle at sea. (See Glete, Navies and Nations, 2:525–26). For the sake of consistency and familiarity, I use modernized dates, rather than retaining the old-style dates of the Julian calendar for the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Finally, a note on Daniel Defoe’s famous A General History of the Pyrates, which has been an important primary source for scholars of Atlantic piracy. Although I list Defoe as the author when citing this source, it is currently believed that Defoe was not, in fact, the author of A General History. It is generally still assumed that Captain Charles Johnson was a pen name, but the identity of the author behind it—if not Defoe—is now a matter of speculation.

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Acknowledgments

This project proceeded slowly. I am grateful to Erica Charters for encouraging me forward and helping me think more comprehensively about some of the cultural aspects of state power in metropolis and peripheries. She offered editorial advice and corrections that improved both form and substance. More important, she made the time devoted to researching and writing this book happy, entertaining, and meaningful. I have had the good fortune to work with knowledgeable and practical editors at University of Massachusetts Press. I much appreciate Clark Dougan’s advice and support through the lengthy transubstantiation of this manuscript into a book. It has been an interesting and painless process thanks to his and Carol Betsch’s expert piloting. Also, I am grateful for the sharp eye of Mary Bellino, my copy editor. I know that no one will read these chapters with as much attention and care as she, and I thank her for helping me be more concise and accurate in my presentation. I must acknowledge my debt of gratitude to those who have tilled much of the ground I now tread upon. It was the provocative works of historians like Marcus Rediker, Robert Ritchie, and David Starkey that drew me and so many other younger scholars to this field of study. More broadly, I am indebted to Jack Greene, Bernard Bailyn, John McCusker, Russell Menard, Linda Colley, John Brewer, Richard Harding, Jeremy Black, T. H. Breen, and Carole Shammas for their research, on which so much of our sensibilities regarding early American and imperial culture, politics, and economics rely. xv

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Ac k n o w l e d gm e n t s

Primary recognition (and perhaps a finder’s fee) is due to Kristen Jordan, who had suggested this research topic to me many many years ago. I thank colleagues at the University of North Texas, Texas Christian University, Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas at Arlington, and the University of Texas at Dallas who have heard me talk about this book at symposia, over lunches and dinners, on walks, and at tennis. For their feedback on this project, I thank them all. Special thanks go to Sophie Burton and Jack Stuckey, who read, marked up, and commented on the completed manuscript, making it more readable and comprehensible for other readers. I am deeply indebted to Chris Ebert, Chris Kingston, and Adrian Leonard for sharing their data, expertise, and advice on matters relating to marine insurance. I am grateful as well to John Hardy for his comments on American privateering, and to John Reid for his willingness to offer aid on early modern law and jurisprudence. Anonymous reviewers added their critique during the manuscript review process; their observations and advice helped a great deal. Jack Greene offered valuable advice and fortifying words during the final stages of revision. Various parts of this book were presented as a working paper at Harvard University’s Atlantic History Seminar; I thank Bernard Bailyn for his support and interest in the project during that stage. His interest, in and of itself, was encouraging and his critique and suggestions useful. Finally, Fred Anderson has worked stealthily behind the scenes for years to support my professional endeavors, for which I am much indebted. Research for this book was funded by generous grants from the University of North Texas and the American Philosophical Society, and conducted at UNT, Texas Christian University, Library of Congress, National Archives, (in Fort Worth, Washington DC, and Waltham, Massachusetts), Peabody Essex Museum, Yale University, Harvard University, Huntington Library, Oxford University, National Maritime Museum in London, British National Archives, Baltimore Public Library, Boston Public Library, and New York Public Library. The interlibrary loan department at UNT’s Willis Library deserves high praise for its outstanding reach, speed, and professionalism; its staff was an invaluable resource for this research project. I also thank my chair, my department, and the UNT College of Arts and Science. Their support, financial and other, was and is much appreciated.

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Finally, I am grateful for the blind luck that landed me in Texas more than a decade ago. I sincerely thank all those responsible for this. Life under the Texas sun is a privilege; peace of mind comes with the locality. I have had the good fortune to find a circle of relaxed, uncomplicated, generous, happy people here. I have enjoyed and benefited from their company, and I thank them, collectively and individually.

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The Ocean

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Is a Wilderness

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Introduction

Piracy is an ancient trade, recorded in Egyptian reports as early as 1350 BC. Pompey the Great famously defeated the pirate fleets that afflicted Roman commerce and logistics in the Mediterranean.1 Pirates continued to practice their trade in European waters throughout the medieval and early modern periods and, although piracy has disappeared from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea in the past 150 years or so, it persisted elsewhere and continues to be a profitable enterprise to this day. The modern practice is a continuation of the old, as is evidenced by the publication of piracy exposés and how-to manuals, informing captains on techniques for assessing and defending against piratical threats.2 Commerce raiding in the North Atlantic (by crews identified as pirates, buccaneers, freebooters, and corsairs) began soon after the discovery of the Americas. The Caribbean in particular attracted commerce raiders from the early sixteenth century because of the vast commercial networks that sprang to life there to sustain Spain’s and Portugal’s New World gold-mining operations and agricultural production. Conditions in the West Indies enhanced pirates’ attraction to the region, since the shores surrounding the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea were often inaccessible to large warships. The many uninhabited and secluded harbors and coves, protected by dangerous reefs, were ideal hiding places for pirate ships and their crews. Moreover, these shores offered plenty of fruit, fowl, fish, and other foods for crews.3 Although some pirates directed their operations against cargo ships carrying highly valuable treasures of gold, sugar, or slaves, most pirate 1

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In t r odu c t ion

crews operated on a low-risk-low-yield basis, coming away with whatever they found on board small merchant vessels—foodstuffs (such as barrels of salted beef or fish and supplies of cheese, butter, salt, tea, coffee, wine, and liquor), small amounts of gold and silver pieces, as well as manufactured goods, such as firearms, construction tools and supplies, packs of linen, and luxury items (in one case, Nova Scotia freebooters carried off a church organ that they had discovered on board their prize).4 European pirates, merchants, and adventurers, then, were drawn not only to the riches produced in the New World (riches from which they were barred by Spain’s and Portugal’s claims to exclusive dominion in the Americas), but also to the ancillary trade supporting European settlement there. Particularly galling to these merchants was their exclusion from the New World slave trade. The inability of the Iberian powers to protect their Atlantic cargoes, vessels, and crews led to the adoption of a highly publicized policy of deterrence. Yet, even though captured pirates were to “be hanged or cast into the sea,”5 attacks continued and intensified, further highlighting the limits of Spanish and Portuguese naval power and dominion. Noting this vulnerability, European monarchs (most notably the houses of Valois and Tudor) not only authorized, but encouraged their subjects “to proceed against the Spanish and the Portuguese in such manner as may best secure their own advantage, until the said Spaniards and Portuguese shall suffer trade to be free within the bounds of the said lands and seas of the Indies and of America, and shall have given them free entry and access to that end into those countries and into the ports and harbours of the same that they may traffic and do business there.”6 The rise and decline of piracy in the Atlantic has been used to gauge the level of commercial, naval, and diplomatic control that Great Britain exercised in the Atlantic World in the early modern era. Indeed, maritime and naval historians have suggested that by 1730, naval, imperial, and colonial officials had effectively eradicated piracy in the North Atlantic thanks to assertive policing of the high seas and New World coastlines.7 Yet statistical data and anecdotal evidence indicate that, even in peacetime, transporting Atlantic cargoes remained risky well into the nineteenth century. These data suggest that Britain’s constabulary command of the region was not nearly as thorough as some have suggested. Moreover, rather than confronting pirates, British officials dealt with the prob-

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In t r odu c t ion

3

lem of piracy in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries primarily through accommodation. Piracy was eventually ushered out of the Atlantic indirectly and inadvertently by reducing its comparative profitability at port, rather than through forceful confrontation at sea. A century and a half of near-constant war had created economic conditions and wartime tax policies that allowed pirates and smugglers to prosper and multiply; the outbreak, in the early nineteenth century, of a stable peace and peacetime tax policies reduced profits from commerce raiding and illegal trade and diminished the scope of these activities in the British Atlantic. Britain’s ineffective anti-piracy campaign reveals not only the limits of British power at sea, but also on land, vis-à-vis its constituents. Scholars of commerce raiding often understand the British anti-piracy campaign as a legal and policy battle line drawn between, on one side, polite society, commercial elites, and the government (local and imperial), and pirate outlaws on the other, with the law reflecting the will, values, and policy agenda of the former.8 The evidence indicates, however, that the battle line was drawn elsewhere and that statutory law did not reflect the interests or legal beliefs of the British public, the commercial community (high and low, near and far), or even the bureaucratic community in London and along British and American coastlines. This calls into question not only the central government’s ability to enforce the law, but also its moral and legal authority among its constituents. Violence and property losses on the maritime frontier were useful to authorities in their efforts to articulate the differences between the illegitimate violence of pirates and smugglers, and legitimate force wielded by the government. Like many modern scholars, anti-piracy crusaders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presented the contest as one involving forces of law and civilization confronting head-on the agents of disorder and lawlessness. Yet the central government’s attempts to extend its jurisdiction beyond its coastal waters, to monopolize violence at sea, to sanction some forms of maritime commerce while delegitimizing others, were consistently resisted, ignored, and thwarted by large swaths of British society on both sides of the ocean. Moreover, this resistance was not merely impulsive or lawless; it was articulated in legalistic and constitutional terms. Piracy, like other forms of technically illegal trade (such as smuggling), was not a rebellion against the existing order, but

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a continuation of conventional practices and traditional understandings of law and jurisdiction. It was Parliament and the Court that were implementing controversial policies and advancing a novel and countercultural understanding of piracy, law, and state jurisdiction. Debating the date of the demise of Atlantic piracy is not merely a matter of pedantry and argumentativeness. The timing of this development indicates how and why it took place—rapidly, through confrontation at sea, or gradually, peacefully, as profits from pirated and smuggled goods decreased in the context of peacetime economies and the advent of free trade. Modern scholars of commerce raiding argue for a revolutionary transformation of public attitudes toward piracy in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, thanks to the British government’s effective legal, naval, law enforcement, and public relations campaign. This claim is succinctly articulated by Mark Hanna: “Structures put in place to eradicate piracy radically changed the economic, legal, political, and even cultural systems that had been ingrained in colonial maritime communities for decades. Fledgling maritime communities transformed from a localized yet Elizabethan mindset to a more modern and imperially integrated mindset.”9 The evidence points instead to persistence of old practices and beliefs in the face of governmental attempts to effect change. The early modern era was one of weak central bureaucracies with limited reach, resources, manpower, and legitimacy in peripheral communities. Thus central governments’ ability to enforce their will and laws at a distance was curtailed by practical limitations, but also by cultural and ideological ones. This was especially true in Britain and its empire. As Linda Colley’s landmark study of the attitudes of Britons toward their state suggests, the development of a national sentiment was inconsistent, gradual, reversible, and internally contested. Colley demonstrates that notions of British identity and allegiance were constructs “superimposed on much older allegiances.” This process was most pronounced “in the face of the near quarter-century of war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France,” but even then—in the first half of the nineteenth century—national sentiment did not crowd out and replace local identities and allegiances. Especially in peripheral communities, “intense localism remained the norm, at least until the coming of the railways, if not until the more violent intrusion

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of conscription in the First World War. . . . Far more nineteenth-century Britons than is usually recognised lived in . . . little worlds to themselves, cut off for most of the time by custom, poverty, ignorance and apathy.”10 The British government’s anti-piracy and anti-smuggling campaigns indeed represented a novel and modern understanding of state sovereignty and jurisdiction (especially the notion of state sovereignty at sea). This understanding, however, did not gain traction with the British public, the merchant class, and local governments, which consistently, vehemently and, in many cases, violently resisted the state’s efforts to curb piracy and other forms of illegal trade. The modern state, with the moral and legal authority it enjoys in the minds of citizens and with the expansive jurisdiction that it claims, was not yet there in the eighteenth century. To the degree that this more modern conception of state was making inroads anywhere, it was in London—specifically, in Parliament, Whitehall, and the City—not in the British and American periphery. Dating the passing of piracy in the 1720s, and the resultant misconceptions regarding the British government’s degree of control in the Atlantic and its hold on Britons’ hearts and minds, are a product of a selective and modern definition of piracy. Most scholars of piracy assume an essential difference between piracy and privateering: whereas pirates preyed on the commerce of all nations, privateers were commissioned by governments (through letters of marque) to carry out similar attacks solely on enemy merchant vessels.11 Thus historians suggest that the close of the seventeenth century saw a passage from an age of Atlantic and Caribbean piracy to an age of privateering; outright piracy was forcefully suppressed and replaced by state-sanctioned, state-regulated, and targeted commerce raiding.12 In fact, however, the eighteenth-century distinction between piracy and privateering was a semantic novelty that did not enjoy universal acceptance. This semantic and legalistic distinction was meaningless in practice as well—privateers were rarely mindful of the restrictions of their commissions, attacking neutral, allied, and British shipping.13 Moreover, privateering commissions attracted more individuals to commerce raiding and made Atlantic shipping more risky and violent. These commerce raiders, many of whom were former pirates, utilized the same types of vessels and tactics as pirates, and often targeted the same prizes. The distinction between privateers and pirates is clearer to modern observers than it was to early modern people. Privateers are perceived by

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some historians as maritime laborers, who at certain times were drawn to commerce raiding and then returned to peaceful employment. Pirates, on the other hand, left the ranks of polite society and legitimate work when they turned pirates. There is little to suggest, however, that this view reflects early modern practices and beliefs regarding both commerce and law. The fact that modern scholars so readily accept the Court and Parliamentary usage of “pirate” and “privateer” indicates greater receptiveness, and even overexposure, to the rhetoric and documentary sources left by one side in the legal, ideological, and cultural contest taking place in the eighteenth century. The same is true of modern studies of smuggling. In quoting Parliamentary and Court records, some scholars discuss smuggling using the language of crime, even though all contemporary accounts—official and unofficial—report that British communities did not consider smuggling to be criminal, illegitimate, or disreputable.14 Modern scholars’ acceptance of the dichotomy between legitimate and illegitimate commerce raiding is misleading because most contemporaries did not see and did not accept such a distinction; more important, it obscures from view the continued presence and activity of pirates in the Atlantic throughout the “long eighteenth century.”15 This gives readers an inflated assessment of Britain’s taming of the Atlantic frontier and implicitly gives credence (from a twentieth-century vantage point) to the presumption of eighteenth-century governments to monopolize the use of force at sea. A focus on high politics, statutory law, and Parliamentary and Court discourse can easily lead to unwarranted credulity regarding state authority, jurisdiction, power, and competence. Atlantic historians offer a view of imperial administration, culture, and economics that focuses less on metropolitan institutions and more on interactions in local and regional levels. The result is an image of empire that is less unitary, less modern, and more fragmented. While this image often clashes with the laws, doctrines, and ideologies produced in metropolitan circles to conceptualize and administer the variety of territories and populations on the periphery, Atlanticists typically see it as a more accurate representation of the way early modern empires functioned. Methodologically speaking, this assessment of the early modern state and early modern communities engenders skepticism toward statutory law as a reliable reflection of the real circumstances of life, commerce, and administration in the localities. In this context, legislation

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In t r odu c t ion

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and court decrees should be understood as gauges of metropolitan irritation with the realities of life in peripheries. Anne Pérotin-Dumon points out a natural tendency to retroactively apply the jurisprudence, sensibilities, and logic of the modern nation-state to early modern states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; to accept as ancient and widely recognized what was, in fact, relatively new and certainly novel. This was unquestionably the case with both the pirate/privateer dichotomy and expansive claims to state jurisdiction, especially at sea: “It was not until the nineteenth century that first England, and then the United States, strove to apply the doctrine of total mastery of the seas.”16 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the enactment of laws regulating commerce at sea mostly registered frustrations in governmental circles with the lawless nature of trade. Such legislation articulated governmental aspirations more than it reflected new commercial practices.17 Historians naturally tend to investigate change rather than the persistence of old forms, beliefs, and conventions. Atlantic history, however, has directed scholars’ attention more forcefully to cultural continuity and persistence of old forms, in contrast to national histories’ attention to cultural transformation and the evolution of new identities and ethics. The British Atlantic remained in the eighteenth century what it had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth—a Wild West, rather than a trading zone regulated by the British state and policed by its navy. The ocean did not become a British sea. When piracy did decline, it was not due to effective policing at sea, or even at port, and not to a sea change in public sentiment toward commerce raiding or the state. Rather, it receded because of developments unrelated to anti-piracy efforts.

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1 Atlantic Frontier

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Continued Piracy through the Long Eighteenth Century

When analyzing or commenting on Atlantic piracy, historians habitually use the 1720s as a line of demarcation signaling the end point of this phenomenon (a transition from the golden age of piracy to a golden age of privateering, some stress). To these historians, this shift reflected the growth of British naval presence and command in the Atlantic World, as British officials on land and on the high seas utilized the Royal Navy and the courts to confront, chase, capture, and execute pirates.1 Robert Ritchie, for example, argues that in the late seventeenth century, larger navies became more effective in policing European waters and thus in curbing piracy there. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, according to Ritchie, naval policing was expanded to the Atlantic and the Caribbean, with demonstrable success in suppressing piracy there as well. Marcus Rediker and Kris Lane credit prosecutorial rigor, even more than this naval anti-piracy campaign, for the eradication of Atlantic piracy in the 1720s, since it was the actions of aggressive colonial governors, bureaucrats, magistrates, and judges (including mass executions of convicted pirates) that turned public opinion against pirates and their commercial and political allies.2 Yet marine insurance rates, court records, and anecdotal evidence indicate that Atlantic shipping remained at risk from maritime predators well past the 1720s in both wartime and peace. Not only has Britain’s command of the ocean and New World coasts been overstated, but the 8

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intensity of the central government’s efforts to combat piracy is often exaggerated as well. The anti-piracy campaign—at sea, at port, and in the courts—was inconsistent always, and usually frustratingly fruitless for those few who were truly perturbed by piracy. British officials habitually dealt with piracy not so much as a problem, but as a normal aspect of maritime trade; sometimes even as an opportunity for accomplishing public-policy or private goals. Thus Britain’s anti-piracy policy more commonly involved accommodation and negotiation than confrontation. The public, as well, remained complicit in piratical activity in the eighteenth century, as it had been in the seventeenth. The Atlantic in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries remained a wild frontier, in which “armed commerce” (commerce au bout de la pique—commerce at the end of a pike) was the norm, not the exception. Historians who date the passing of Atlantic piracy to the 1720s rely heavily on official reports and on the anti-piracy statutes enacted into law, in both England and its New World colonies. They see the energy and forcefulness of Lord Bellomont’s and Edward Randolph’s actions against pirates, as well as the enactment of anti-piracy laws by Parliament and American assemblies, as evidence of decisive and effective crime fighting. One scholar sees this as evidence that the pirate trade had withered away by 1701.3 Others, too, see 1698 to 1701 (the years in which the two most prominent imperial officials in America—Edward Randolph and Richard Coote, Lord Bellomont—famously exposed, attacked, and prosecuted pirates, their collaborators, and their sponsors in the colonies) as a sharp turning point that led to the forceful suppression and rapid eradication of piracy within twenty years or so. Most prominently, Marcus Rediker charts the decline of Atlantic piracy by calculating the number of active Anglo-American pirates, with piratical ranks reaching a low of two hundred by 1726.4 But this computing system is based on the number of Anglo-American ships mentioned in British court records and other public accounts. Unaccounted for are pirate crews operating on non-British ships or on ships that did not make it into the public record. Shirley Carter Hughson, in 1894, also dated the demise of piracy (in South Carolina) to 1720, based on the fact that piracy prosecutions in that colony ended at that point. Robert Ritchie similarly dates the demise of piracy to early in the eighteenth century based on a decline in the volume of piracy trials.5 Relying on the number of piracy

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trials is a tricky proposition, however, given that only a fraction of criminal trials in eighteenth-century Britain and British North America were subjects of print reporting, and most of the trials committed to print were recorded without detail of the proceedings (most notably, accounts of testimony and argumentation).6 One must keep in mind that public concerns over illegal activities—as reflected in criminal prosecutions and journalistic reportage—go through ups and downs according to fad. In modern society, for example, anxieties over offenses like drug abuse, violent crime, racial violence, underage drinking, illegal immigration, domestic violence, and tax fraud fluctuate, as do criminal prosecutions and news coverage. These fluctuations do not necessarily match shifts in the prevalence of these offenses. Similarly, a decline in the number of piracy prosecutions and accounts of piracy in the popular press need not be taken as evidence of a decline in piratical activity in the eighteenth century. This is true of crime in general; historians of eighteenth-century crime point out that the ratio of prosecuted crime to all crime was low. In this context, changes in prosecution rates reveal more about the behavior and priorities of prosecutors than about actual law-breaking in society.7 At different times in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the rate of piracy prosecutions declined—most notably, before and during wars—as a result of governmental distraction or purposeful laxness. This should not lead one to conclude that piratical attacks were on the wane during the great imperial wars. Admiralty and criminal court records hold data on pirates who were caught and indicted. As is the case with smuggling and other nominally criminal acts, the extent of piratical activity that did not result in capture or indictment is reflected by other indicators. Court records can, in fact, mislead scholars not only to underestimate the scope of certain types of criminal behavior, but also to misjudge public attitudes toward them. Whereas statutory law, royal proclamations, and writs of indictment assert the criminality and odium of piracy, offering a clear line of demarcation between piracy and privateering, other data indicate that the law did not reflect the general public’s sensibilities and beliefs. Insurance records reveal that risk levels to Atlantic cargoes remained stable in the 1710s, ’20s, and ’30s, and that no sources of risk were eliminated during the 1720s. Moreover, official reports, legislation, court records, journalistic accounts, and private correspondence confirm that Britons continued to

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engage in and support piratical and contraband trade despite efforts to delegitimize, outlaw, and suppress it in the eighteenth century. These data indicate that maritime predation remained a constant and conventional feature of maritime commerce well into the nineteenth century. Marine insurance premiums in the eighteenth century must be understood and analyzed within the context of a burgeoning and highly competitive marine insurance market on both sides of the Atlantic.8 As late as the late seventeenth century, most commercial shipping remained uninsured. Merchants protected their investments by arming their ships, but protecting one’s capital investments was accomplished mostly by reducing risk—buying small shares in ships and/or cargoes, dividing a cargo into small consignments on different ships, and entering into agreements with other merchants to share in one another’s losses at sea.9 Insurance was more prevalent in “rich trades”—trade in valuable overseas commodities such as spices, silk, and precious stones and metals. The high prices commanded by such imports, as well as the high cost and high risk of long-distance transportation, explains merchants’ willingness to purchase insurance. Bulk trades such as grain—traveling over shorter distances and with relatively low ratios of value to cargo space— did not usually justify the purchase of insurance until insurance rates began to decline in the late seventeenth century.10 As long-distance trade expanded and the habit of purchasing insurance for commercial vessels began to take hold, the insurance market expanded, both in the Netherlands—Amsterdam was the leading European market for marine insurance in the seventeenth century—and across the English Channel in London. Despite the growing intensity and scope of maritime predation in the “golden age of piracy,” marine insurance rates actually dropped steadily (by roughly 50 percent) between 1650 and 1750.11 This consistent price-cutting was the result of greater competition among insurance underwriters; it certainly did not coincide with, and did not reflect, greater peace or security at sea. In the 1710s and 1720s, when London began overtaking Amsterdam as the leader in the field, insurance underwriting became big business.12 In 1718 two insurance corporations, the Royal Exchange Assurance and the London Assurance, were established with royal charters, which increased competition, especially in long-distance trade.13 Concerned that joint-

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stock public offerings would allow large insurance firms to lower premiums further, independent underwriters cut their rates to remain in the market. Beyond this clear reduction in actual rates brought about by the expansion of the insurance market, there was also a hidden rate reduction, as underwriters switched in the 1720s—incidentally, a high-water mark for piratical activity in the Atlantic—from insurance contracts that compensated clients for 75–90 percent of losses, to contracts promising 98–99 percent compensation. This increase in coverage (along with a decline in the number of underwriter defaults and bankruptcies) was tantamount to reducing premiums further by 15–20 percent.14 Competition within the marine insurance industry continued to drive rates lower throughout the eighteenth century, with peacetime rates remaining at roughly 50 percent of wartime levels.15 This indicates that competition drove down rates for wartime and peacetime insurance from the early eighteenth century on; that is, insurance premiums kept declining over the decades despite increased predation at sea in wartime. Increases in the cost of wartime shipping overall were due primarily not to the higher rates of commerce raiding and marine insurance, but to other features of wartime economies, such as high wages, high freight fees, and supply shortages.16 The lower cost of insurance allowed English and European merchants to insure ships and cargoes as a matter of course. The wholesale reliance on insurance—that is, the dramatic expansion of the insurance market— encouraged continued price-cutting on the part of underwriters. This is evidenced, among other things, by the decline of other, older, forms of risk-sharing.17 The market expanded further, leading to increased competition and lower rates, with the emergence of an American marine insurance industry between the 1720s and 1740s.18 The War of American Independence and the French Revolutionary Wars gave a tremendous boost to this sector of the American economy and by the early nineteenth century, British underwriters began to feel the impact of American insurance companies (although American merchants continued to insure their ships and cargoes in London well into the late nineteenth century).19 It is apparent that insuring cargoes became cheaper because of increased competition among insurers, rather than any diminishment in the threat posed by maritime marauders to ships at sea.20 In fact, the downward trend in insurance rates began and continued consistently

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during the height of the “golden age of piracy,” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This general, consistent, and market-driven drop in the cost of marine insurance should be taken into account when evaluating insurance rates as reflectors of risks to commercial shipping in the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. Premiums for marine insurance on cargoes headed from Amsterdam to European ports fluctuated wildly between times of war and peace. For example, the cost of insurance for an outbound journey from Amsterdam to Venice was 5 percent of insured value in 1650, 20 percent in 1703 (at the outbreak of the War of Spanish Succession), and 3 percent in 1750. These changes reflect the risk to cargoes in times of war, but also demonstrate the sharp decline in rates (a 40 percent drop) between 1650 and 1750. For voyages to New World ports, however, insurance rates remained more stable during this century, even in times of peace. For example, insuring an outbound cargo from Amsterdam to Brazil in 1650 cost a premium of 4 percent, while an outbound voyage to Curaçao in 1703 (at the start of the war) cost 10 percent, and the same voyage in 1750 cost 6 percent.21 That is, while the overall cost of insurance persistently dropped between 1650 and 1750, the cost for transatlantic voyages did not. Similar risk assessments for Atlantic voyages are evident in the records of British insurance underwriters. In the peace years before the outbreak of the War of Jenkin’s Ear (1739–1743) and the War of Austrian Succession (1742–1748), merchants were charged an average of 3–8 percent (depending on the season) for outbound Atlantic voyages; during the war years that followed, rates jumped to an average of 12–25 percent. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), marine insurance underwriters in Philadelphia charged rates of 8–20 percent for outbound Atlantic and Caribbean voyages (5 percent with convoy protection by the Royal Navy), compared to a peacetime rate of 3–6 percent.22 Again, then, despite overall rate reductions owing to increased competition (especially with the emergence and growth of an American marine insurance market in the first half of the eighteenth century), peacetime rates for Atlantic voyages remained relatively stable, and comparable to rates offered by Dutch underwriters in 1650 and 1750. Wartime rates for Atlantic shipping declined slightly from the War of Austrian succession to the Seven Years’ War, but remained relatively stable through the 1770s and 1790s, during the American War and the French Revolutionary Wars.23

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It is evident that Dutch, English, and American insurance underwriters, well positioned as they were to evaluate risks to maritime trade, bucked the general trend of declining rates over the course of the eighteenth century when it came to insuring Atlantic and Caribbean cargoes. They certainly did not consider voyages to and from New World ports any safer after the late 1720s, when piracy was allegedly eradicated. The stability in rates over time indicates, at the very least, a stability in the level of risk, including that from violent seizure.24 A survey of marine insurance policies issued in Salem, Massachusetts, during the course of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) reveals a wide array of wartime rates—between 5 and 22 percent—for outbound transatlantic voyages.25 After the reestablishment of peace, in the 1810s and ’20s, insurance rates returned to the familiar peacetime rates in place in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: 3–6 percent for voyages to the West Indies, South America, and the Cape of Good Hope, with premiums showing minor declines from the early 1820s to the early 1830s.26 By the midcentury mark, piracy in the Atlantic was sufficiently diminished, giving insurance underwriters at Lloyd’s “little occasion to consider anything beyond the ordinary perils of the sea in the assessment of premiums,” resulting in declining insurance premiums over the next twenty-year period.27 These statistical data of marine insurance rates corroborate weighty anecdotal evidence indicating continued pirate activity in the Atlantic well into the nineteenth century.28 In the late 1710s and early 1720s, William Byrd and others complained about pirates active in the mid-Atlantic, including Chesapeake Bay itself.29 Colonial court records indicate continued and repeated piratical attacks from the mid-1720s through the 1730s. An Admiralty Memorial to the King in Council from 1730—after the alleged demise of Atlantic piracy—suggests granting apparently unmotivated naval captains and crews financial incentives to pursue pirates, given that the “seas of America and the West Indies [were] infested with piratical ships and vessels which commit frequent depredations upon [English] trade.”30 In response to continued depredations, in 1731 George II instructed the governor of Massachusetts, Jonathan Belcher, to commission British men of war within his jurisdiction to set sail to the host ports of offending pirates to demand—at the point of a gun—the release of prisoners and restitution of stolen merchandise.31 Belcher felt com-

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pelled by repeated complaints of “much damage and molestation from piratical vessels” in the Atlantic to outline and publicize the proper procedures for reporting acts of piracy to the Admiralty.32 Caribbean-based Spanish freebooters operated as far north as New Jersey and New York during the wars of the mid-eighteenth century, persisting in peacetime as well. While local authorities in the Gulf of Mexico did not encourage such peacetime predation openly, they did not do much to discourage it.33 English piracies, as well, afflicted British trade, leading the British customs service to ask in 1758 (during the Seven Years’ War) for the revocation of letters of marque issued to small vessels, and for discontinuing the practice altogether, as “it is notorious that many of them have committed acts of Pyracy in the channel against His Majesty’s subjects, and also those of Neutral Powers.”34 British pirates were still active in the English Channel—boarding and robbing ships of countries at peace with Britain—in 1768 and 1783.35 Across the ocean, too, pirates remained visible, active, and dangerous. The register of the High Court of Admiralty lists numerous commissions issued in 1762 and 1772 and transmitted to colonial capitals (in Barbados, Leeward Islands, Jamaica, Bermuda, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland) for trying pirates in America.36 Indeed, several acts of piracy and piracy prosecutions were reported during the Seven Years’ War and the years of peace that followed.37 Such reports persisted during the War of American Independence, leading a number of American states, as well as the United States itself, to establish and authorize courts to try piracy cases.38 Following precedents set during the colonial period and under the Confederation, the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8), drafted in 1787, authorizes Congress to define and punish piracies on the high seas. Based on this constitutional sanction, congressional legislation in 1790 prescribed capital punishment for captains and sailors who colluded with pirates to rob their own vessels.39 It is evident, then, that piracy still represented a significant risk to shipping and an irksome challenge to governments in the late eighteenth century. It continued to be so in the nineteenth. In 1800, ten pirate barges attacked four American vessels near Hispaniola, capturing two, despite an armed escort by the US schooner Experiment.40

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That same year, courts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey registered their frustration with the conviction of four men for acts of piracy at sea.41 In 1805, President Thomas Jefferson complained about pirates infesting American coastlines and harbors, carrying off cargoes and crews.42 In 1807, Peter Atkins faced trial in London for piracy in the English Channel, as did William Jemott in 1812, for boarding and robbing $40,000 worth of goods from a ship in the Caribbean.43 Trading firms in Havana reported piracy-related losses of $2–3 million between 1808 and 1817.44 In 1817, the American consul in Saint Thomas (a Danish colony) recommended to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams that the United States maintain a number of cruisers in the vicinity to protect American shipping from pirate attacks. He pointed out that the Royal Navy kept a few battleships in the area to escort British merchantmen safely into Caribbean ports, whereas American ships were dissuaded from traveling into some ports for fear of pirates.45 That same year, an American naval force captured Amelia Island, a Spanish territory off Florida’s east coast, evicting a large band of American and other pirates (numbering roughly 150) who had settled there after the war and used it as a base of operations against American trade.46 In 1818, American seamen faced trial as pirates in federal court in Massachusetts for attacking and robbing a Spanish merchantman of sugar, honey, hides, coffee, silver, and gold.47 In 1819, an American crew of a Buenos Aires privateer (Luisa) took to open piracy in the Atlantic. They eventually ran aground in the Carolinas and were executed as pirates.48 A survey of piracy cases adjudicated in federal court in New Orleans (District Court of the US Eastern District of Louisiana) reveals the persistence of piracy in the early nineteenth century: 8 cases tried in the three years prior to the War of 1812, 40 cases during the war, and 124 cases adjudicated in the twelve years following the war’s end.49 This data from the New Orleans federal court corresponds with an observation that, from 1815 to 1823, “piracy cases were among the most numerous and controversial of those decided by the [Marshall] Court.”50 During these years (1815–1823), more than 3,000 acts of piracy in the West Indies and off the coast of Florida were recorded in Niles’ Weekly Register.51 It is noteworthy, then, that the 172 piracy trials held in New Orleans represented only a fraction of actual piratical attacks that took place within the jurisdiction of this court during these two decades (1809–1827). Also noteworthy is

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that there was no discernible drop in the rate of piracy prosecutions after the cessation of hostilities in 1815. In fact, the end of the Napoleonic Wars saw the return of thousands of sailors—Spanish, Americans, French, British, and Latin American—from serving on warships or privateers to similar service as pirates over the two decades that followed the war.52 Like Britain and Spain, the US government and navy attempted to control, chase, and suppress pirates off its southern coasts and in the West Indies.53 In March 1819, Congress passed “An Act to protect the commerce of the United States and punish the crime of piracy,” which authorized the president to employ naval force for commerce protection and to instruct naval commanders “to subdue, seize, take and send into port” pirate ships. This act also authorized merchantmen to oppose and capture pirate vessels, and to bring captured pirates to face trial, where they would face penalty of death, if convicted.54 Subsequent congresses kept these provisions in force, yet the 1820s saw increased pirate activity in the mid-Atlantic (for example, the cases of Jane and Orleans, American merchantmen relieved of $20,000 and $60,000 worth of goods), which drew considerable attention and resources from the US Congress.55 The Republican Compiler reported in June 1820 on four separate cases (in Boston, Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans) in which American authorities had arrested, imprisoned, executed, or pardoned pirates operating in the Atlantic, concluding with the hope that “the numerous instances of piracy and murder will be lessened by these awful examples,” and adding, “Although the pirate and murderer may exult for a time, yet justice will overtake him sooner or later.”56 In the latter part of 1819 and early in 1820, forty convicted pirates were executed in the United States.57 That same year, the Senate’s Committee on Naval Affairs considered a plan— suggested by naval officer James Ramage and forwarded by Commodore John Rodgers—for the defense of American commerce against pirates in the Gulf of Mexico. The committee report quotes Ramage’s complaint about the lack of enthusiasm of the “mixed population in this part of the country” to enforce the law properly. Furthermore, it points out that, since the government’s main source of revenue was duties on imports, cracking down on piracy was critical for proper customs enforcement and for the national government’s finances.58 In response to a request from the US House of Representatives, President James Monroe reported in 1820 that armed vessels of the American

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navy had been patrolling the Gulf of Mexico as a deterring force against active pirates there. Also, “all the ships and vessels of war proceeding from the United States or returning to the same from the Mediterranean, coast of Africa, or elsewhere, have instructions to take their route through the West India islands, to afford protection to our commerce in that quarter.” This report cites a number of piratical attacks on American ships in the gulf.59 A report to the House of Commons on persistent seizures of British merchantmen in the West Indies triggered repeated complaints in the London Times of the Royal Navy’s fecklessness, compared to the energetic response of the US Navy.60 Congressional reports indicate that attacks persisted, eliciting a reiteration of the need for American naval vessels to patrol the Gulf of Mexico, as well as a message from President Monroe “on the subject of piracies committed on the seamen and commerce of the United States in the West Indies and Gulf of Mexico” (December 10, 1822).61 A subsequent letter from the secretary of the navy to the chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs reported the outfitting of an additional force for the suppression of piracy in the vicinity of the West Indies.62 In 1822, a Havana trading firm skeptically noted the actions of the US Navy, counseling the outfitting of merchantmen with artillery pieces and sufficient numbers of armed crew members to defend against pirates.63 Continued petitions to Congress from American merchants asking the government to “take into consideration the subject of piracies committed on the commerce of the United States,”64 as well as piracy cases tried in American courts,65 indicate that the navy’s campaign against piracy was not crowned with success. Official correspondence and congressional reports—such as “Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs, upon the subject of piracy, accompanied with a bill providing additional means for the suppression of piracy” (January 11, 1825), and “Report of the Committee of Foreign Relations of the House of Representatives, on piracy and outrages on American commerce by Spanish privateers” (January 31, 1825)—reflect American frustration over this failure.66 In an 1828 report from Cuba titled “The Pirates” (printed in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming Gazette the next year), the author discusses piratical predation in the Atlantic and complains about government inaction and leniency in this regard. The Lycoming Gazette (under the subtitle “Energy and Promptness”) goes on to reassure its readers that, according to the

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New York Evening Post, the latest piratical attacks on American vessels had prompted the Department of State to send a naval squadron to “scout the West India seas [and] visit every port which could afford the murderers any shelter, at least once a week.”67 An 1843 newspaper editorial in the Wiskonsan Enquirer (Madison, Wisconsin) critiqued Britain’s assertion that its naval vessels had a “right of visitation” at sea, denying that the right of visitation was crucial in the pursuit and suppression of pirates on the high seas.68 At no point, however, does the editorialist suggest that piracy was a nonissue in 1843. In fact, he discusses piracy as a real problem that the right of visit was powerless to overcome. Indeed, piracy trials continued in British, Spanish, and American courts in the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s.69 The fact that the US government responded to complaints regarding piratical attacks in the 1820s and ’30s—with legislation and proclamations, as well as considerable funding and specific directives for naval operations—indicates that the government recognized piracy as a significant threat to American commerce. At the very least, piracy was seen as a serious public relations problem, as continued attacks signaled governmental impotence to the American public. By the time the United States began its own efforts to curtail pirate attacks on shipping, numerous governmental and naval attempts by European powers, over the course of three centuries, to pursue, suppress, and remove pirates from Atlantic trade routes had proved unproductive. The Royal Navy was not effective as a pirate-hunting force, in part because naval captains were not eager to chase and attack pirates in American waters, since these same officers were often—if not routinely—engaged in trade for private profit. (Naval officers could undersell civilian traders, since they themselves paid “neither freight nor custome, nor run any risque” in pirate infested waters.)70 In 1719 William Byrd of Virginia gave voice to this complaint, tying the swarms of pirates in the Atlantic with the commercial distractions of naval crews: “Our captains of men of war are so intent on trade, that they neglect their stations, and contrive to be blown away to the country whither their traffick calls them.”71 During the high tide of piratical activity in the 1820s, critics charged that naval captains were not merely distracted from pirate hunting, but that they benefited directly from the continued presence of active pirates

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in American waters by hiring out their vessels to carry valuable cargo or protect merchantmen in pirate/privateer-infested waters: “So long as the alarm produced by pirates compels merchants to send their specie on board British men of war, and to pay the commanding officers a per centage for transporting it,” a London Times editorial read, “we can hardly expect from those officers any attempt to crush the system of piracy, the indirect source of their profits.”72 Yet even if the issue of motivation is set aside, one must recognize the inherent limits of British naval power. Claims regarding the Royal Navy’s ability to effectively police the Atlantic are belied by regular blockade-running and extensive contraband trade and smuggling during wartime, not only in the Atlantic but also in the comparably more manageable English Channel. Piracy and contraband trade persisted also in the Mediterranean—a smaller area that was much better patrolled and controlled than the North Atlantic—until the 1830s, when French coastal occupation in North Africa and British naval operations crippled piratical operations there.73 Navies in the eighteenth century, and still in the early nineteenth century, did not have the capacity and ability to seal coastlines and police maritime trade routes, especially in the vast expanses of the Atlantic Ocean: as Richard Harding notes, “Seapower was neither precise nor overwhelmingly destructive. It could achieve highly significant local results, but it did not have at this time what Mahan later claimed to be its principal strength—the ability to apply ‘noiseless, steady, exhausting pressure.’ ”74 Men of war were more useful in deterring pirates than in chasing and capturing them in open waters. Generally, pirate hunting was not practicable, nor was it practiced, in the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.75 One should not read too much into the well-publicized accounts of the Royal Navy’s successful attacks on pirates in the early eighteenth century, such as the capture of celebrity pirates like Edward Teach (Blackbeard) and Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart). After all, similar successes—resulting in prosecutions, convictions, and executions—were achieved before and during the “golden age” of piracy, without diminishing the scope of the pirate trade.76 Such anecdotes should not be taken as indicative of overall naval effectiveness against pirates (not in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and not in the eighteenth), nor of anti-piracy activism on the part of naval captains, nor of a moral opprobrium for piracy in British communities or even in the navy itself.77

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Modern research reveals that there were no large-scale and sustained British naval operations, or even presence, beyond European waters in the eighteenth century.78 The Royal Navy’s campaign against Atlantic pirates, such as it was, yielded no captures in 1715 and 1716, and only a single capture (a vessel, but no pirates) in 1717. The resurgence of piracy in the 1710s and ’20s points, in fact, to the ineffectiveness of measures taken by the British and French navies against Atlantic and Caribbean pirates.79 Conceding that successful chases and attacks on pirates were few in the 1710s and ’20s, Peter Earle stresses that their conspicuousness—especially the killing of Teach and Roberts—signaled a turning of the tide for the Royal Navy, leading to the eradication of piracy by the late 1720s.80 And yet, Earle points out that the scope and ravages of piracy in the 1810s and ’20s likely outpaced those of the golden age.81 When Pompey the Great was commissioned in 67 BC to suppress pirate fleets in the Mediterranean, he seemed to have recognized the limitations of the naval tools at his disposal. Pompey secured the Mediterranean for Rome by bribing piratical communities with pardons and generous land grants.82 His solution—a general pardon—was applied by English governments to pirates operating in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as early as 1687. Although repeated offerings of a general pardon were not successful in subduing piracy in those quarters, the adoption of this measure indicates the failure of other measures.83 In 1717, and again 1718—in advance of Britain’s declaration of war on Spain (the War of the Quadruple Alliance, 1718–1720)—George I offered and publicized general pardons to active pirates who surrendered themselves and vowed to retire from the trade.84 Colonial papers indicate that many active, experienced, and capable freebooters took advantage of the offer to serve Britain as privateers against Spanish shipping, only to return to open piracy later.85 Captain Woodes Rogers began his tenure as governor of the Bahamas (1718–1721) by conscientiously targeting pirates in this well-known pirate nest. He reported success in this endeavor, but whatever success he had— which was by no means complete—was not accomplished through naval confrontation at sea. The Navy offered Rogers no assistance, which is why he dealt with pirates mostly through recruitment (giving jobs and commissions to known pirates) and through aggressive action on land and at port. Moreover, Governor Rogers’s local success did not change the overall scope of piracy in the Caribbean. Contemporary sources indicate

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that pardoned pirates returned to piracy, and that Atlantic piracy hit new highs in 1719 and the early 1720s.86 The pardon was utilized by the United States government as well in its attempts, on the eve of the War of 1812, to entice American pirates away from piracy and into privateering. As was the case with British and French pirates in the early eighteenth century, pardoned American pirates returned to their old trade over time.87 The persistence of piracy in the early modern era was indicative of commonly held beliefs about maritime commerce. Both metropolitan and colonial observers in the eighteenth century viewed the Atlantic as a region “beyond the line,” where Britons were free to engage in forms of violence that were unacceptable in Britain and in Europe’s law-bound state system.88 Similarly, trade in the Straits of Malacca was described in 1800 as armed commerce.89 In 1700, Jamaica’s royal governor, Sir William Beeston, informed the Board of Trade that he could not rely on officers of the Royal Navy to tackle the scourge of piracy, since they themselves engaged in armed commerce: “The ships of war, when they get so far from England, believe themselves lawless.”90 From the perspective of treaty law, the idea that law and order—and treaties—did not extend beyond “the line” (west of the prime meridian, south of the Tropic of Cancer) originated in the 1559 Treaty of CateauCambresis between France and Spain. But this legal doctrine merely codified, or reflected, the state of perpetual violence and war in the Atlantic. Since European courts and enforcement agencies did not extend beyond the line, one could not expect legal protection or remedy in those waters. Maritime powers, then, understood Europe to be a zone of law, while the world beyond was widely perceived as a place of disputed jurisdictions and endemic war.91 Indeed, Atlantic commerce took place in a constant war zone. During the “long eighteenth century,” trade was mostly conducted against a backdrop of globalized European wars. But even in peacetime, the Atlantic was a place of chronic violence, where no single power could expect others to accept its jurisdiction, its territorial claims, and its understanding of the law. This attitude of “no peace beyond the line”—the sense that the extra-European Atlantic was legally distinct from Europe—was starting to change in the late eighteenth century, but this change was evident only

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in governmental circles in London, not in the New World colonies or in the minds of ordinary Britons.92 One cause for chronic violence and lawlessness along New World coastlines was the decentralized nature of the British empire; that is, by Britons’ enshrined right to be governed by English common law, even in far-flung plantations in the Americas. It was understood, even by agencies of imperial governance, such as the Board of Trade and Board of Admiralty, that metropolitan jurisdiction was limited by that of provincial governments.93 Enforcement of Britain’s Navigation Acts along American coastlines was, therefore, difficult and uncommon, if not wholly nonexistent. This allowed extralegal trading practices to remain prevalent and socially acceptable.94 The modern sensibility—shared by historians, among others—that war and violence represent a disruption of normal life, politics, and commerce, was not shared by early modern Europeans.95 At a time when trading firms enjoyed royal monopolies to trade in certain markets or regions, or in certain goods, any sea captain, foreign or domestic, who acted in violation of such a monopoly knew that he faced the prospect of forced seizure and confiscation by the chartered trader or trading company. Thus this kind of trade required ships to travel armed in order to defend themselves against attack from the legal trader in that market. It required the legal trader, as well, to travel armed to tackle interlopers.96 Since only ships outfitted to defend themselves at sea could undertake long-distance voyages, merchantmen were, as Anne Pérotin-Dumon notes, equipped for “a form of trade that could require the use of force.”97 Moreover, piracy was not necessarily a full-time vocation; whereas some operated exclusively as commerce raiders, other traders and sea captains resorted to it only occasionally, when need dictated or opportunity arose. Since most merchantmen were armed for self-defense, vessels could always turn to raiding.98 Armed commerce—defensive and offensive—was the norm at sea, not the exception. In addition, mercantilist concepts of the global economy called for and reflected commercial competition between states.99 In wartime especially, predation on French, Spanish, and Dutch commerce was effective in denying enemies the benefit of supplies, while simultaneously enriching Britain. The wars of the mid-eighteenth century, for example, dramatically increased the scope of commerce raiding, but also the volume of

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shipping and trade, both licit and illicit. Especially in commercial hubs like New York, therefore, British merchants, producers, and manufacturers anticipated financial benefits and economic growth when war was imminent.100 But even in times of peace—of which there were precious few for Britain in the long eighteenth century—plunder was conducive to national strength in an economic system predicated on the idea of relative gains. Maritime predation was, therefore, a feature of peacetime commerce, just as it was of war. It was integral to imperial rivalry; so much so, that long-distance trade was often regarded as a “mild form of war.”101 Indeed, most large-scale Atlantic merchants in the mid-eighteenth century obtained letters of marque, allowing them to legally supplement their profits from trade with enemy prizes.102 As Pérotin-Dumon observes, commerce “was equally nourished when the cargo sold at home ports had been seized rather than bought.”103 In fact, pirated goods, like smuggled goods, were more affordable than purchased and taxed goods. The contention that by the eighteenth century pirates had become nationalistically sentimental and did not attack their own countries’ trade is not borne out by the nature of maritime trade in the early modern era, nor by the long list of recorded incidents in which pirates and privateers made prizes of their compatriots’ merchantmen. Moreover, the high occurrence of wreckers (land pirates) attacking any vessel that ran aground, of merchants and others engaged in smuggling and trade with the enemy in times of war, and of underwriters insuring enemy ships in wartime, indicates that Britons and Americans did not exhibit a sense of national allegiance that is recognizable to modern observers.104 Numerous accounts indicate that British and American pirates and privateers attacked all comers—friend and foe, foreign and domestic.105 This absence of national allegiance on the part of freebooters is not surprising, given contemporaries’ understanding of the lawless nature of maritime commerce, but also given that pirate and privateering crews were multinational and multilingual. And governments—national and provincial—regularly issued privateering commissions to foreign captains and crews.106 During the War of American Independence, increasing numbers of American merchant captains took to adding to their Ship’s Passport, or Clearance, a declaration that “no Subject of the King of Great Britain directly or indirectly hath any Share, Part or Interest therein,”107 in the mostly vain hope that such declarations would protect merchant-

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men from American and allied privateers. British merchantmen carried similar declarations (“No American or Foreigner having Part, Share or Interest therein”) to avoid attacks from British privateers, with similarly poor results.108 Wrecking, or land piracy, perhaps best exemplifies the adherence of commerce raiders to local custom, rather than state authority and law; it demonstrates vividly the persistence of traditional English and American attitudes regarding armed commerce in the face of governmental efforts to eradicate such attitudes and practices. Like commerce raiding at sea, wrecking was an ancient trade that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic until the early nineteenth century. In both the British Isles and North America, wreckers salvaged cargoes from ships that ran aground. They habitually did more than plunder wrecks, however; using false signals, wreckers would lure vessels ashore in order to attack them there.109 Wreckers were active also on major waterways, such as the Thames, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers.110 English laws as early as the thirteenth century forbade wrecking and plundering on pain of death, castigating its practitioners as barbarous and savage. These laws extended the royal government’s protection over wrecked ships and cargoes. Since, according to royal edict, the survival of passengers (including livestock) preserved the original owner’s proprietary rights, wreckers often made sure that no living thing escaped the wrecks that they targeted. (This royal edict was rescinded in 1771, but the practice of killing the crew continued, in both England and America.)111 Although central governments denounced wreckers as pirates and criminals, they were, for the most part, powerless to confront or intimidate them. Anti-wrecking legislation in Britain shows increasing severity toward this crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet the evidence points to the ineffectiveness of such legislation to curb this trade.112 Efforts to prevent wrecking, or to capture and punish wreckers and their collaborators after the fact, were inconsistent, weak, and certainly ineffective, as wreckers continued to enjoy widespread support and cooperation from local inhabitants in British and American coastal communities.113 In fact, wrecking was an activity that—like smuggling and piracy—encompassed whole communities.114 Wreckers could not pick their targets in advance, nor discriminate between countrymen and foreigners, allies, or enemies. (In fact, given the patterns of British and American trade,

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they were more likely to induce friendly vessels ashore than enemies.) This did not raise ethical doubts in their minds and the minds of their neighbors about the legality or propriety of their trade. Since force and predation were integral to trade, especially in the Atlantic, and especially during the long eighteenth century, wrecking was accepted as being on a continuum of conventional—and conventionally violent—practices of maritime trade.

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2 Frustrated Aspirations

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The Legal and Ethical Presumptions of the Early Modern State

Crucial to the accepted dating of the rise and decline of piracy is the sharp distinction historians draw between pirates and privateers. By doing so, these historians accept and perpetuate a distinction initially drawn by the courts of the Great Powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thus giving credence to legal and political doctrines that, while conventional and intuitive for moderns, were quite novel and peculiar in the early modern era. Virtually every modern account of piracy that highlights the distinction between piracy and privateering includes a disclaimer that this distinction was, in practical terms, a vague and moving target; that it was extremely difficult, as Robert Ritchie explains, to distinguish “the legitimate commerce-raiders from the bogus or merely piratical.”1 In Pirates and Privateers, for example, David Starkey discusses the line of demarcation between pirates and privateers, as outlined by Ritchie, pointing out that “this demarcation provides the agenda for [this] volume.” And yet the same paragraph highlights doubts regarding this demarcation. Starkey clarifies that such doubts pertained primarily to small, emerging states in Latin America issuing privateering commissions in bulk—for a price, or after the fact—during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.2 The practice of issuing commissions in bulk, for a price, and ex post facto was common—endemic, in fact—in the established courts of 27

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Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. What cast doubt on the legitimacy of privateering commissions issued by emerging Caribbean and Latin republics, therefore, was not the way in which they were issued, but the limited size, strength, and prestige of the issuing state governments. When modern historians express reservations about the validity of these commissions and refer to these privateers as pirates, they echo the terminology and policies of Europe’s early modern Great Powers.3 These historians apply Great-Power legal and cultural parameters to the study of Atlantic piracy; moreover, they reinforce the statist ideology—“state building”—promoted by those European courts.4 Thus a modern historian can explain that writing about “piracy and privateering separately . . . reflects the reality that pirates and privateers were essentially distinct species of predator in the post-1700 maritime world,” while at the same time suggest that only the privateers of the Great Powers can be legitimately considered a “distinct species of predator”; privateers of break-away republics, on the other hand, were piratical to a degree, if not outright.5 As noted in chapter 1, the tendency of modern historians to rely on statutes and official records can lead to a misrepresentation of actual commercial practices and conventions in the early modern era. Not only do such records give a false impression of the vigor of piracy prosecutions, but many of the sources utilized by modern historians reflect and represent the assumptions, mentality, and presumptions of Parliament, the Court, and other agencies of state. They represent one side of an ideological contest and do not reflect the degree to which Parliamentary ideology of state was contested, resisted, or merely ignored in the localities. Robert Ritchie, for example, cites new governmental regulations in the early eighteenth century, arguing that privateering had become a wellregulated business, “from the initial license to the final decree in prize court.”6 Indeed, privateering commissions articulated the precise boundaries of legitimate commerce raiding.7 Colonial and national authorities offered lengthy and detailed articulations of proper legal procedures of capturing prizes, bringing them to port, and claiming title to them in court. Further, these regulations outline procedures for processing prize claims, addressing the protests of aggrieved shipmasters or proprietors, assessing competing claims, and so forth.8 Contemporary legal treatises, such as John Maxwell’s The Spirit of Marine Law, provided exhaustive elucidations of the terms and restrictions binding privateers (supplemented

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by copious explanations of prize procedures),9 and Admiralty courts applied such laws, regulations, and proclamations to actual cases brought before them.10 Such sources offer an instructive reflection of metropolitan governments’ view of the line separating pirate from privateer. Ship owners borrowed this legal boilerplate in their instructions to privateer ship captains, repeating the injunctions and restrictions articulated in the privateering commissions.11 Privateers were to post a bond before setting sail as collateral for good behavior, and violation of the terms of their commissions could result in forfeiture of their bond, confiscation of their prizes, additional fines, imprisonment, and even death.12 Modern accounts and early modern sources, then, point to the existence of a robust body of legal and bureaucratic provisions that purported or attempted to regulate privateering. While historians acknowledge at times, and in passing, that such regulations were not particularly effective at actually regulating the trade, they nevertheless reinforce the Parliamentary and Court pretense of authority, jurisdiction, and effectiveness on the peripheries of the British state. Such accounts give credence to early modern statutes, royal proclamations, and Parliamentary rhetoric as reliable reflections of reality on board ships, in port towns, and in local government bureaucracies. If a similar approach were adopted to study contemporary American society, one might conclude—based on legislation and prosecutions—that the government has managed to regulate and restrain a host of social ills that, in actuality, it has been impotent to control. All modern scholars and cataloguers of piracy and privateering acknowledge that it was difficult, if not impossible, to keep privateers within the bounds of legal conduct and to prevent these crews from broadening their operations into piracy. A recognition that virtually all privateers were also pirates, mixing privateering with piracy in a single expedition, should severely undermine the legalistic distinction articulated by eighteenth-century governments and twentieth-century historians, turning it to a purely academic and semantic one. Contemporaries in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as products of a premodern state, intuitively accepted as a practical and ethical reality the murkiness and irrelevance of the legal categories—pirate and privateer—handed down by Parliament. Whereas state authorization for commerce raiding

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matters a great deal to modern historians, it was a relatively hollow concept in societies that did not recognize that the state had the jurisdiction, the legal authority, and the moral legitimacy to allow or disallow armed commerce. In “Salutary Neglect,” James Henretta describes an English society whose commitment to reliance on past legal precedent had “hardened into a positive antipathy to change.” Indeed, he documents how reforming traditional practices in governmental circles clashed with the conservative habits and the common-law instincts of the general public.13 This assessment conflicts sharply with that of many scholars of piracy, who claim that English communities and local institutions—traditionally friendly and hospitable to pirates and contraband trade—underwent a rapid and revolutionary transformation in the early years of the eighteenth century; that the imperial anti-piracy campaign impelled British towns and villages to shed their localist mentality, their economic orientation, and their backward-looking legal and political culture and to integrate themselves into an emerging modern, centralized British state. As Mark Hanna states, the transformation of the pirate nest into a pirate-hunting nest marked “a shift from ‘community law’ focused on local issues to a modern form of ‘state law’ focused on grievances of a larger public.”14 While the modernization and centralization associated with the Glorious Revolution and the rise of the nation-state seem inexorable when studied from an imperial perspective, the view from the localities is different. Linda Colley has demonstrated that “state building” was slow and inconsistent in early modern Britain, and that the state’s claim to authority and legitimacy was regularly contested. Henretta and Colley reveal that national sentiment did not supersede local identities and allegiances, even as late as the mid-nineteenth century.15 Jack Greene, as well, cautions against interpretations suggesting national consolidation of authority and centralized control, both in England and the Empire, following the Glorious Revolution of 1688: historians’ “preoccupation with national events and central institutions and their focus upon the ascendancy of parliament” has obscured another consequence of the Revolution—a discernible retreat of central authority from local affairs. The Glorious Revolution saw a devolution of authority to local governing authorities; metropolitan interference with local custom and local privilege declined

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after 1688, allowing the continuance and growth of aristocratic independence in local communities. This “tenacity and force of local custom” was evident in the eighty years following the Glorious Revolution not just in England, but also in the peripheries (Ireland and North America), with the entrenchment and enshrinement of the authorities and liberties of colonial assemblies.16 J. E. Cookson demonstrates that even at the turn of the nineteenth century, at the height of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, local populations in Britain were able—through local government—to retain traditional local arrangements and protect local interests in the face of governmental pressure from Whitehall. Indeed, Cookson’s study suggests that the pressures of constant war made the national government more reliant on the cooperation and support of local governing bodies, leading to a “thickening of local government . . . that only added to the amount of patronage and authority out of the state’s reach.” Cookson challenges the modern impression of an increasingly centralized British bureaucracy, in which peripheral communities were brought into harmony and compliance with national policy. More important, he contends that modern scholars are misled by their sources to envision a modern state in late eighteenth-century Britain: “Parliamentary legislation dealing with matters of national policy is a totally inadequate measure of what was happening to Britain’s political culture.”17 English settlers in the New World brought with them from the mother country an entrenched localist political and cultural mindset, and a restrictive view of the role of the national government in local governance.18 A policy, or habit, of “salutary neglect” reflected the decentralized nature of the English state and allowed the divergence between metropolitan opinion and legislation and colonial practice to go unaddressed until after the Seven Years’ War. British officials themselves recognized and upheld these separate jurisdictional spheres. In 1746, for example, the Lords of Admiralty held that the Admiralty lacked jurisdiction to intervene with respect to piratical depredations of American privateers; only the governors who had commissioned them had the “power to curb [their] insolencies.”19 This devolution of authority from the center to the localities was replicated within the colonies as well. Just as a weak military presence and limited patronage in the colonies meant that metropolitan policies succumbed to colonial opinion and custom, so the absence of law

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enforcement agencies within the colonies and a widening distribution of the franchise meant, as Greene observes, that “provincial polities had to adopt a similarly consensual mode of governance towards the localities, a mode that was necessarily highly sensitive to local interests and opinions.”20 Both in England and in the colonies, then, the reins of government were wielded by local elites and reflected local custom and interests.21 The supremacy of local habit and opinion over metropolitan legislation was, in fact, particularly evident in matters relating to piracy and contraband trade. While doctrines of Parliamentary supremacy and imperial Parliamentary jurisdiction were forming in governmental circles in London, local communities in England and abroad retained a more traditionally early modern understanding of law and of the boundary between central and local authority. Thus while Parliamentary statutes and royal edicts articulated the criminality and heinousness of piracy, wrecking, smuggling, and illicit trade, British communities continued to practice these trades and did not consider them to be illegal or disreputable. Christopher Hill’s Liberty against the Law demonstrates how widely at variance was the law, as enacted by Parliament and understood by the Court, from the legal beliefs, as well as the informed legal opinion, of wide segments of English society. In a political culture in which law, authority, and jurisdiction were not codified, practice and common law were the primary guides as to what was constitutional.22 The English custom regarding maritime trade accommodated the practice of violent seizure, while English law (statutory law, that is) increasingly sought to regulate and, eventually, abolish it. The Declaration of Paris (1856), which abolished the use of privateers by Britain and France, was seen by many in Britain (as well as Spain, the United States, and Mexico) as a violation of a fundamental right of the sea, and of commerce.23 Thus even as late as 1856, in a nationalist era defined by bureaucratic centralization and consolidation, an earlier understanding of law and jurisdiction still persisted, one that saw commerce raiding as a natural feature of maritime life and commerce and denied landed governments jurisdiction at sea. The English state had claimed sovereignty in the “British Seas”—a geographical region that remained undefined—since the late fourteenth century, although this claim to sovereignty at sea was consistently rejected by foreign courts.24 Thus successive generations of Englishmen were

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born, lived, and perished with the recognition that, the Court’s rhetorical bombast notwithstanding, the sea was free from governmental control and jurisdiction. State rhetoric condemning piracy and upholding state jurisdiction at sea was as old as Rome. But so was the recognition of the state’s de facto impotence at sea. The revival of claims to English authority at sea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clashed with the accepted recognition—on the part of European governments and of English seafarers—that state authority stopped at the shore (as far out to sea as a cannon will carry).25 It was long understood that the customs and laws that governed international relations in Europe were de facto null and void in distant waters, where the absence of European states’ governmental agencies (namely, courts) made settling grievances peacefully and judicially impossible, or at least impractical and improbable. Thus Alberico Gentili (1552–1608), who served as Regius Professor of Law at Oxford and as an advocate for the Spanish Crown in the court of James I, concluded that “a pirate commits a less serious crime if he commits it on the high seas which are under no law.”26 As late as the early nineteenth century one can still detect, even in governmental circles, a discomfort with the notion of state sovereignty at sea. The US Supreme Court, under the leadership of John Marshall (who was not usually hesitant to claim far-ranging and thoroughgoing jurisdictions for the federal government), denied American and foreign claims to jurisdiction at sea, holding that activities outlawed by statute are, in fact, protected—or at least beyond the range of prosecution—on the high seas.27 In later years the Supreme Court yielded to notions of universal jurisdiction in piracy cases, although decisions still exhibited confusion as to the boundaries and origins of state jurisdiction at sea.28 Christopher Harding argues that modern legal doctrines regarding the breadth and depth of state authority have engendered anachronistic assumptions in modern scholars with regard to piracy; namely, a “view of piratical activity as an exceptional and seriously offensive kind of criminal activity.”29 This anachronism, indeed, is facilitated by the modernist rhetoric of legislatures and courts in the early modern era. Other royal courts and legislatures in Europe produced legislation and proclamations that utilized this same language, highlighting the distinction between patriotic, law-abiding privateers and savage, outlaw pirates.30 This was a

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narrative of state that conforms to a modern understanding of state and law but did not reflect the legal and political beliefs of the general public and local governments in the eighteenth century, nor even those of many officeholders in national governments.31 Courts and jurists in the seventeenth century issued judgments that recognized piracy as a normal act of war, through which the robber gained legal possession of pirated goods.32 By the eighteenth century, the official view of piracy had changed. National governments’ judgment on piracy reflected the opinions of legal scholars such as Hugo Grotius (who had promoted a novel view and definition of piracy), but not the general judgment of eighteenth-century Europeans.33 Whereas eighteenthcentury governments and courts increasingly saw unlicensed maritime predation as a unique form of criminal activity, local governments and local communities involved in maritime trade continued to view armed commerce as it was universally regarded in the seventeenth century—as the norm, rather than the exception. In fact, American courts in the early nineteenth century still resisted some aspects of the modern definition of piracy, as they did modern notions of state jurisdiction at sea.34 Indeed, publishing and publicizing the trial records of piracy cases represented a conscious effort by governments to disseminate and justify a definition of piracy that was at odds with that of the general public. Although this effort by the British government failed to convince colonial governors and coastal populations to shun pirates and pirated goods, it reveals a recognition that a campaign against piracy required a campaign against the commercial habits and the legal and moral beliefs of consumers, merchants, officeholders, and magistrates.35 As mentioned earlier, the accepted explanation for, and dating of, the demise of piracy rests on the assessment that English communities and local governments rapidly evolved out of their long-standing and traditionalist attachment to common law and economic, legal, and political localism, and shifted their orientation and allegiance to an emergent modern British state, governed by civil law. Yet the evidence indicates that the novel attitudes espoused by the Court and Parliament with regard to trade and state jurisdiction, and the policies accordingly enacted by the national government, did not reflect widely held views in British society and did not wash away older belief systems and practices regarding maritime trade, local interests, and local governance. Indeed, impe-

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rial officials routinely complained throughout the eighteenth century about recalcitrant local communities, both in Britain and North America, whose actions, they believed, bordered on rebellion or treason. American and English merchants regularly traded with the enemy in times of war,36 manufacturers preferred to sell military supplies in the private market rather than to purchasing agents of the government,37 smuggling and contraband trade took place on a massive scale throughout the British Atlantic,38 merchants and local authorities supported and gave cover to known pirates and smugglers,39 local mobs happily rescued indicted and convicted pirates from custody,40 wrecking continued unabated despite governmental condemnations and efforts at suppression,41 and, in general, the central government was widely viewed as “a broker of ‘corrupt’ privileges to a caste of insiders,” specifically with regard to trade regulation and taxation.42 This was not a public mentality that lent itself to a shift of allegiance and trust from the local to the metropolitan, from common law and accepted custom to statutory law. Local communities not only differed with Parliament and the Court about the criminality of a host of activities (maritime predation and dealing in pirated goods chief among them), but also denied the national government’s claim to jurisdiction at sea and within the localities. This divergence between local communities and custom, on the one hand, and the national government and the civil law, on the other, was particularly evident with regard to privateers. The distinction between piracy and privateering originated in the halls of government in London and did not extend far beyond Whitehall. The term “privateer” was coined in the early seventeenth century for a brand-new legal arrangement between governments and commerce raiders.43 Like the arrangement it was coined to describe, the term privateering was a semantic novelty and came—in time, and only for some—to signify something distinct from piracy. In common usage, though, and in most quarters, “privateer” simply signified a private man of war, without suggestion of a government commission to commit seizures upon the seas. Terms such as pirate, privateer, filibuster, buccaneer, and freebooter were used interchangeably and synonymously by English, Dutch, and French mariners, in both war and peace.44 This lack of clarity was not a symptom of laymen’s ignorance of the subtleties of law; eminent legal scholars, too, were prone to denying or disregarding the alleged contrast between piracy and privateering.45

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Occasionally, even imperial authorities utilized legalistically inconsistent terms when referring to commerce raiders. A 1695 report to the King in Council on trade in Jamaica, for example, notes approvingly that the slave trade supports a strong local economy and encourages shipping and trade. It adds that these employment opportunities keep the sailors in the colony from “privateering.”46 The tone and context of this comment indicate that the author did not apprehend privateering as a patriotic service that Jamaican sailors rendered in pursuance of their king’s interests at sea. Similarly, official reports and complaints issued during the War of American Independence by George III, General Henry Clinton, and Lord Weymouth (secretary of the Southern Department) refer to American privateers as “privateers.”47 In invoking this legal term, these imperial officials did not intend to confer legitimacy on the actions of American freebooters or on the government that had commissioned them. Rather, their choice of words to describe actions that they regarded as rebellious or piratical merely reflects a fluidity in the terminology of commerce raiding. In Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, a privateer was defined as late as the mid-nineteenth century simply as “private ship of war,” with no reference to state authorization. An 1844 American edition of the Johnson dictionary lists “privateer” in its more modern usage, whereas an 1849 English edition does not. The 1859 English edition, however, does define the term as modern dictionaries do—an armed private vessel commissioned by a state to cruise against an enemy’s commerce. While the third edition of Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1731) does define a privateer as a “ship fitted out by one or more private Persons, with a licence from the Prince or State to make prize of an enemy’s ship and goods,” the second edition (1724) has no entry for the term. Moreover, the 1724 edition defines “caper” as “a sort of Pirate-Ship or Privateer,” indicating that the modern—and legalistic—distinction between pirate and privateer was not yet in common currency. In fact, it seems that the modern usage of “privateer” (the usage suggested by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century anti-piracy crusaders in Parliament and the Board of Trade) was accepted generally by the English-speaking public only around the time that privateering was outlawed, in the midnineteenth century. The fact that modern scholars have accepted only the legalistic definition of privateering—the Parliamentary and Court defini-

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tion—suggests that they have been overexposed to the rhetoric and documentary sources left by one side of the legal, ideological, and cultural contest over the regulation of maritime trade; the side that eventually, in the long run, won. Although modern historians differ with early modern observers as to the meaning of “privateer” and the distinction between privateering and piracy, they do recognize that, in practical terms, there was no operational and ethical difference between licensed and unlicensed commerce raiders. Modern histories and early modern sources both indicate that the line separating privateer from pirate was, more often than not, indistinguishable or nonexistent during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as privateers routinely and openly violated the terms and restrictions of their commissions by attacking neutral, friendly, and allied shipping, including attacks on ships of their own compatriots.48 Operating on the principle of “no prey, no pay,” privateer crews were impelled to operate as pirates in deed, if not—as a matter of legal technicality—in name. As a contemporary account indicates, such conduct was seen as a feature of privateering: “Ships went out as Privateers, but being Abroad, could not be distinguished from Pirates, for they fought and took any Ships promiscuously that came in their way, and the Merchants in America, who fitted out [these ships], and enquired not how they came by their Spoils and Prizes, but only commended and encourag’d them the more, the more they had taken.”49 Moreover, since local authorities issued commissions freely and indiscriminately—such documents could be purchased, inherited, borrowed, postdated, obtained retroactively, and, of course, stolen or forged—most English pirates carried such official letters merely as a form of insurance against the rare possibility that they might find themselves in court facing piracy charges. This legal tactic was already common in the freewheeling days of the golden age of piracy, and continued to be so throughout the eighteenth century.50 Some privateering commissions were themselves vague and expansive in their target definitions, allowing their holders to be indiscriminate in their operations without exceeding their legal bounds.51 Another useful defense against prosecution were false declarations legitimizing forced seizures—privateers would force captains and other crew members of neutral or allied ships to sign statements, at the point of a gun, testifying that they were carrying war contraband.52

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This state of affairs reflected the Wild-West practices and conventions of maritime trade in general, and Atlantic trade in particular. As discussed in chapter 1, long-distance trade in the medieval and early modern eras involved plunder and reprisals, as all merchantmen were armed and most private warships also engaged in trade, illegal trade, and smuggling.53 It was believed, in fact, that enemy ships could be taken as prizes legally even without a privateering commission (although a commission would—it was hoped—protect against the charge of piracy in foreign courts).54 It is estimated that in the mid- and late eighteenth century, only a third of the British privateering fleet was comprised of private men of war, fitted specifically to attack merchantmen. The remainder of the fleet was composed of merchantmen, transports, and customs cutters engaged in other activities but also availing themselves of maritime predation when the opportunity presented itself. A similar observation is raised in Rear Admiral Caspar Goodrich’s account of the United States’ efforts at piracy suppression in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1820s. Piratical attacks, in many cases, were carried out by traders who took to commerce raiding when the opportunity presented itself, rather than as a vocation.55 In practice, therefore, the Atlantic functioned as a war zone, with predation remaining widespread even in the rare instances of declared peace. Indeed, Parliamentary law recognized this reality in 1708, with the passage of the Cruisers and Convoys Act. The law simplified the process of applying for and receiving privateering commissions and gave up entirely the state’s cut in prizes, raising crews’ share of booty from 80 to 100 percent. The French court granted similar terms to its own privateers, with the Spanish Crown following suit from the mid-eighteenth century on.56 Retaining 100 percent of the plunder had always been an option open to privateers who were willing to forgo the court proceedings stipulated in their commissions and sell their cargoes privately, as did pirates and smugglers. The passage of laws prohibiting such conduct indicates that it was not uncommon for privateers to sidestep proper procedures when bringing prizes into port.57 Thus it was the desire to entice active pirates into government service, as privateers, that led governments to offer captains free legal protection by equaling the profit margins offered by outright piracy. Given that privateers violated the restrictions of their commissions as often as they adhered to them, the result of the 1708 act was that privateering in the eighteenth century looked more like piracy

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than ever before—not less—as most contemporary and modern observers acknowledge. European privateering, then, accommodated existing patterns and habits of commerce raiding, rather than supplanting or transforming them. This explains why it was common for spikes in piratical activity to occur immediately after the cessation of formal hostilities in Europe: pirates who operated with legal cover in wartime and were counted as privateers by the authorities (and, therefore, also by modern historians) simply continued to practice their trade as before. Procedures and regulations enacted to establish strict control over the conduct of privateers at sea failed to deter or effectively punish violators, and certainly failed to curb piratical attacks by ships armed with privateering commissions. Ship captains were required by law to post a bond to assure their observance of the terms of their commissions. Transgressors faced other penalties as well: forfeiture of prizes, fines, imprisonment, and even death, for acts deemed to be piratical.58 Parliament’s decision in 1759 to deny commissions to small vessels—those accused by the customs service as most likely to abuse their authority and engage in illegal or piratical trade—was itself an indication that existing incentives, regulations, and sanctions failed to keep privateers within bounds. The act stipulated new measures to ensure compliance—a ship owner would apply for a commission in writing, declaring the weight and strength of the ship, which was to be recorded in the individualized commission itself. Upon leaving port, the shipmaster would submit the ship to the local customs officer for inspection; once the customs agent was satisfied that the ship matched the mass and strength stipulated in the commission, he would grant a clearance certificate allowing the ship to leave port. A privateer sailing without such a clearance would have its commission revoked, its prizes and bail forfeited, and its commander imprisoned for up to a year. Similarly, a customs agent granting a clearance to a ship that was too small to qualify for a commission faced the prospect of termination and fines (some of which would fund the reward to the informer or informers who had turned him in).59 Persistent complaints of abuses during the two major wars that followed indicate that these elaborate measures fell well short of their intended goal. Prize courts, the final venue for wronged parties to confront piratical privateers, also failed to provide effective recourse, punishment, and deterrence. An owner whose ship was taken in violation of privateering

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restrictions could appeal to the courts, but suing a privateer, usually through an agent, and often in a foreign court of law during wartime, was complicated, lengthy, and expensive.60 It was not uncommon for such challenges to last up to four years or more. In 1756, for example, a British court reversed a seizure of a Spanish ship as unlawful. In 1759, the case was still in process, as the court collected affidavits about the cargo and the trading routes. The case remained under consideration in December 1760 and was finalized only in September 1761.61 Such delays, along with the partiality of the witnesses and uncertainty of the verdict, drove most traders to turn to insurance, rather than courts, to protect them from the effects of seizures at sea. Despite the universalist rhetoric of judges and magistrates, who articulated principles of international law that transcended national boundaries and interest, prize courts were difficult venues for foreign plaintiffs.62 Indeed, allies and neutrals often denied the ultimate jurisdiction of British courts, seeing unresolved conflicts as a matter for diplomatic resolution, rather than a legal one (defined by British law).63 The recognition that privateers differed little from pirates was still evident in the nineteenth century. The Times of London, for example, complained that privateering commissions were used for “cloaking a piratical purpose,”64 and the fluid terminology in official documents reflects a similar conclusion in governmental circles in America. A congressional report on piratical attacks in the Caribbean by the Committee of Foreign Relations of the US House of Representatives (January 31, 1825) refers to acts of “piracy” by “vessels bearing Spanish commissions.” It goes on to discuss attacks by vessels “commissioned, with doubtful commissions” and by pirates, although the pirates flew the flag of one state or another to disguise themselves as privateers.65 Other American reports, as well—on Spanish, American, and other privateers taking to open piracy—indicate that the distinction between the two categories of freebooters was still legalistically dubious and practically meaningless.66 It is understandable that the general public used “pirate” and “privateer” interchangeably to describe the same activity, as both contemporary observers and modern historians agree that privateers habitually acted as pirates and vice versa.67 The insistence that privateers were essentially different from pirates in terms of their targets and practices was an ideological declaration by governments engaged in state-building, specifically with regard to the jurisdiction of the state and the authority of law. It was

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not a credible description of trade and commerce raiding at sea to anyone associated with maritime navigation.68 This is why English newspapers and merchants, for example, could speak of Spain’s Caribbean guarda costas (coast guards) as pirates, since Spanish wartime privateers were commissioned, upon declaration of peace, as guarda costas, thus seamlessly continuing their wartime activities.69 In British America, as well, when Parliament offered naval officers incentives to act as enforcement agents for the customs service, Rhode Island merchants are reported to have regarded naval vessels as piratical.70 Similarly, American petitioners referred to British privateers acting in compliance with their commissions as “Piratical,”71 and Rear Admiral Goodrich characterized the Gulf of Mexico in the early nineteenth century as infested with pirates, even though many of these were technically privateers.72 The murky overlap between pirates and privateers was at times acknowledged by government officials.73 Occasionally it was even reflected in the way courts of law treated commissioned privateers. European courts usually respected foreign privateering commissions—if these were issued by states and governments whose legitimacy was deemed acceptable—by not trying foreign privateers as pirates, yet privateering commissions were occasionally rejected as an acceptable defense against charges of piracy.74 When diplomacy and might allowed, the courts could treat privateers as pirates. Alexander Justice’s General Treatise of the Dominion of the Sea (1705) clarified that, by law, English subjects were to be tried as traitors and pirates if serving an enemy government as commissioned commerce raiders. Justice explains that this was so because sovereigns could only commission their own subjects as privateers. This principle implied, then, not only that English commerce raiders in French service could be regarded as pirates, but that all non-French freebooters serving the French king as privateers faced this risk. Dutch law followed this same logic.75 Other governments, too, chose at times to dispute or disregard the legality of foreign commissions: Spanish authorities in the New World were known to execute privateers as pirates with their commissions hung around their necks;76 a 1701 edict instructed Swedish naval officers “to hang as Pirates and Freebooters, all the Privateers that shall be taken in the Baltick Sea, with Commission either from the King of Poland or the Czar, without any manner of regard to their Commissions”;77 and

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in Britain, a Richard Cadman Etches petitioned for a royal pardon, challenging his 1789 piracy conviction with a privateering commission from “Her Imperial Majesty” Catherine II of Russia (although the result of this particular appeal is unknown, it is clear from the text that previous attempts to reverse his piracy conviction on the strength of his Russian commission were unsuccessful).78 Maritime commerce was characterized by endemic violence and lawlessness despite legislative efforts by metropolitan governments to extend their jurisdictions beyond their coastlines and to regulate oceanic navigation. The ease and security with which merchants, captains, and their collaborators got around the law, as well as the legitimacy that these alleged lawbreakers enjoyed in their communities, sent British mariners and traders a message stronger than any statute of the civil law as to what business practices were de facto legal, customary, and acceptable. Like British parliaments, Dutch legislatures passed numerous acts during the golden age of piracy to regulate privateering and delineate the differences between pirates and privateers, to define the crime of piracy, and to denounce pirates as enemies of civilization and of law and order. As was the case in England, such legislation coexisted with a general acceptance of Dutch commerce raiding against friend and foe. Despite harshly worded laws and company regulations prohibiting such practices, both the Dutch West India Company and East India Company routinely and openly sponsored piracy, traded with pirates, and even engaged in piracy directly.79 Dutch anti-piracy legislation matched English laws in stipulating harsh and lethal penalties, but as a rule, prosecutions were uncommon, punishment—in the rare cases of conviction—mild, and pardons widely available.80 According to the laws of the Dutch republic and the Dutch East and West India Companies, commerce raiding was allowed only at times of war, only with an official license from the central government, and only against enemy shipping (including neutral ships trading with the enemy or using enemy ports). More instructions and regulations were added during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ranging from prohibitions against attacking Dutch and allied ships to prescribing two daily prayers for all crew members, prohibiting blasphemy on board ships, and ordering privateer crews to be satisfied with their wages and rations.81 The fact that such acts were reissued regularly and with escalating

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rhetorical ferocity offers a useful indication of contemporary practices and shipboard habits on privateers—practices and habits that central governments wished to curb. The passage of such legislation should not be construed as inaugurating a new maritime ethic, but as registering official frustration over continued practices. The inability of governments to translate anti-piracy legislation into effective enforcement at sea and at port outlined to the general public—much more than parliamentary theories of sovereignty—the true and practicable extent of metropolitan governments’ jurisdiction and authority. Thus articulated legislative boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate raiding were wholly academic, as privateers violated the restrictions of their commissions with impunity as a matter of course. Laws and penalties against piracy, wrecking, and smuggling were reflective of attitudes in segments of metropolitan legislatures and courts, but conflicted with reigning notions of common law and accepted practice in coastal communities. In keeping with the general European culture of armed maritime trade, piratical commerce had established itself in virtually all of England’s New World colonies early on. Pirates brought their goods to port openly, often at the invitation of local governors. Successive administrations in Spanish, French, English, Danish, and Dutch New World colonies supported commerce raiding in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries by selling letters of marque and royal pardons, but also by offering safe and friendly ports and markets for stolen goods. In the British North Atlantic, numerous ports, such as Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Charles Town, Nassau (New Providence), and Kingston (Jamaica), were known as hospitable harbors for pirates and as lucrative markets for piratical goods. Commerce raiders of various nationalities enjoyed the backing of colonial officials there, who, for a fee, offered helpful contacts, useful intelligence, and immunity from arrest. Freebooters also benefited from the cooperation of business contacts in these ports—individuals who were often members of the governing elites in these colonies—who could find markets for plunder, provision and outfit pirate vessels, and provide other valuable services (removing barnacles from hulls, for example, to enhance maneuverability and sailing speed). It was not uncommon, therefore, for pirates to use their wealth to integrate themselves into these mercantile communities and even rise to positions of prominence in polite society.82

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Furthermore, it was common for groups of English merchants and other men of wealth (including cabinet members, members of Parliament, and colonial councilmen, assemblymen, and judges) to collectively finance and outfit vessels for piratical and/or privateering expeditions as far off as the Indian Ocean.83 These were, in essence, joint stock ventures, in which investors pooled their resources and shared both the risks (losses at sea) and profits (prizes) of these expeditions.84 These economic ties were cemented with social relations, as merchants and local officials entertained pirates, who reciprocated with lavish gifts for these men and their wives. Governor William Markham of Pennsylvania, for example, was notoriously transparent in this respect, going as far as marrying his daughter to a known pirate by the name of James Brown, who later used his elevated social status to win a seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly.85 This long-standing cultural, political, and economic pattern persisted in the nineteenth century. In the years following the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, the US government was frustrated by the protection and legal cover that Latin American governments provided piratical crews preying on American commerce and by the friendship and hospitality offered to them by local merchants and officeholders. At the same time, representatives of the Spanish Crown complained of the toleration and support for armed private fleets in American port cities (an 1817 letter from Don Luis de Onis to secretary of state James Monroe notes Baltimore and New Orleans, in particular, as flagrant cases) and of widespread and enthusiastic American trade in pirated goods. Indeed, American captains and crews operating as South American privateers out of Atlantic and Gulf ports from Maryland to Louisiana enjoyed high regard in their communities during and after the war. They operated freely and openly; when they were arrested for their alleged crimes, they were often forcefully released by sympathetic crowds or acquitted by supportive juries.86 The result of this widespread embrace and support for commerce raiding, and of the expansive market for pirated goods, was a consistent increase in the scope of commerce raiding in the Atlantic from the mid-eighteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. As wartime economies created profitable conditions for freebooting, so freebooting stimulated local economies on both sides of the Atlantic.87 Open hostilities between armies and navies attracted tens of thousands of individuals to commerce raiding at sea over this period, with warring governments offering privateering commissions by wholesale.88

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Commerce raiding intensified in response to increased maritime traffic in wartime (greater traffic supported greater numbers of freebooters), increased profits attainable from the capture and sale of certain goods (such as military provisions and food supplies), and the reduced cost of letters of marque and royal pardons. Thus the protracted and recurring wars of the long eighteenth century turned the Atlantic into a particularly fertile environment for sea robbers. Indeed, marine insurance rates indicate that maritime traffic became significantly riskier following the outbreak of war.89 When licensed commerce raiding became a diplomatic liability—during and after peace negotiations, for example—the number of privateering commissions dwindled to a trickle. Yet commerce raiding (defined now as piracy) flourished despite the cessation of hostilities, and risks to cargoes returned at their prewar levels. While privateering commissions—especially those issued by provincial governors and breakaway republics—were often considered legally questionable by most governments, local communities regarded local commerce raiders as honest traders, innocent of wrongdoing. Maritime predation was not regarded as a violation of the law or of the peace, but as a normal and conventional feature of maritime trade.90 Coastal communities, therefore, routinely sheltered freebooters from arrest, incarceration, or prosecution. Pirates who were indicted were often acquitted by colonial juries or released by cooperative governors (or other magistrates). They were also known to “escape” from colonial jails with great ease and regularity.91 Indeed, England’s establishment of Vice-Admiralty courts represented an attempt by King and Parliament to limit the ability of local juries and magistrates to undermine effective prosecution of pirates.92 Nevertheless, incentive and local culture frustrated metropolitan designs. A ViceAdmiralty court judge had little to gain by acquitting a ship taken as a prize by privateers, but received a significant cut of the proceeds of the ship’s sale when it was condemned.93 Moreover, acquittals would have discouraged captains and crews from bringing prizes in as privateers and encouraged them to publicly flaunt the law by acting openly as pirates. Just as merchants, assemblymen, councilors, governors, judges, and other colonial and imperial administrators were invested in piracy, so pirates invested time, energy, and money in cementing these networks of social, commercial, and political associates by offering gifts or special items at reduced prices to influential friends, especially members of

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governors’ councils and their families. A contemporary account of New York politics (June 1695) reports on this happy arrangement: “We have a parcel of pirates . . . in these parts, who get great booty of Arabian gold. The Governor encourages them since they make due acknowledgment. One captain gave him a ship which he sold for £800, and every man of the crew a present of Arabian gold. Another [captain was] presented with a gold watch to engage him to make New York his post at his return; and he retaliated the kindness with a present of jewels.” Similarly, the accounts of Massachusetts governor William Phips show a payment of £1,500 (in 1694) “received from pirates, he giving them liberty to come to Boston.”94 The result of such exchanges was a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship between individuals who performed different roles in local economies and administrations, but who often came from the same social and economic circles; certainly, the merchant community—which was involved directly and indirectly in piracy—was also well represented in colonial assemblies and councils. All of Britain’s colonial possessions were objects of official complaints regarding their hospitality toward smugglers and pirates in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Cooperation was offered by merchants, wrights, mechanics, and the like, as well as local officeholders.95 That colonial proprietors, provincial legislatures, and imperial administrators chose to cooperate with pirates, rather than comply with Parliamentary acts for the suppression of piracy, testifies to their own economic self-interest, but also to the perceived legitimacy of commerce raiding and the social and political influence of commercial interest groups in England’s New World colonies. Not only did pirates trading in English ports (especially in the New World) not bear the stigma associated with robbery and criminality, they were welcome guests and associates of the rich and powerful, who often owned shares in their commerce raiding expeditions. The few imperial officials who attempted to combat piracy and illegal trade—such as Edward Randolph (surveyor-general of the customs in America and, later, colonial agent for the Board of Trade) and New York governor Richard Coote, Lord Bellomont (1698–1701)—triggered angry responses and intense political pressure from colonial subjects and their commercial associates in London. Bellomont knew well why his efforts won him such enmity among constituents and local officials: “They say that I have ruined the town by hindering the privateers (for so they call

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the pirates) from bringing in £100,000 since my coming.”96 Indeed, local authorities—customs officers, Vice-Admiralty judges, naval officers, and others—obstructed Bellomont’s endeavors, and commercial interest groups in New York dispatched a representative to London to request the reappointment of Bellomont’s predecessor, Benjamin Fletcher, claiming that the governor was secretly working in the service of the Dutch to drive trade away from New York.97 This vociferous and strident opposition, no doubt, influenced his successors to discontinue Bellomont’s policies regarding piracy. While the corruption-busting efforts of Bellomont and Randolph bore fruit between 1697 and 1699, with the stripping of the commissions of Governors Fletcher, Markham, and Trott (of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Providence, respectively) and mass arrests of suspected pirates and their trading partners and confederates,98 Parliamentary legislation was effectively blocked on the local level after this burst of anti-piracy activism. Many of the pirates arrested by Bellomont escaped easily—as usual—to the welcoming economies of nearby colonies, and maritime predation continued for more than a century as an important, and widely respectable, form of maritime commerce in New World port towns. The 1690s saw a burst of anti-piracy activism by the central government in London and a few of its local agents in America; they did not, however, initiate a sea change in the commercial habits, legal beliefs, law enforcement practices, and political philosophy of British communities on both sides of the Atlantic. One can find instances in previous decades (during the height of piracy’s “golden age”) of anti-piracy action taken by local authorities—occasional prosecutions of pirates in local courts, antipiracy rhetoric from newly appointed governors, and anti-piracy legislation passed by provincial assemblies at the behest of Parliament or the Court—but these did not represent a serious or fruitful campaign against piracy, as piracy continued to flourish.99 Similarly, the endeavors of Randolph and Bellomont in the late 1690s were noticed and felt by contemporaries, but they were not viewed then—and should not be interpreted today—as evidence of a sustained or effective campaign against piracy. Parliament’s anti-piracy stance represented a divergence of interests between the central government and lower levels of British administration, both at home and abroad. More important, it represented a novel (and

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modern) understanding of state sovereignty, which was not universally accepted by British subjects, the merchant class, imperial bureaucrats, and colonial governments. Although King and Parliament had officially extended the authority of English law across the Atlantic through the establishment of Vice Admiralty courts,100 enforcement remained lax. Indeed, piracy still posed such a threat to British commerce after the War of Spanish Succession that in 1717 and 1718 George I offered amnesty to active English pirates, in the hope that immunity from arrest might lead them to consider a career change. And since the royal offer did not elicit the desired response, Parliament passed stricter legislation, providing harsher penalties for sailors who cooperated with pirates and guaranteeing pensions for sailors wounded in the defense of a commercial vessel against pirates.101 Nevertheless, commerce raiding persisted despite this governmental campaign to curb and delegitimize it. In fact, modern estimates suggest that British trade was more hard hit by pirates in the decade following the War of Spanish Succession than it was by the combined naval and privateering fleets of Spain and France during the war.102 Moreover, the scope of official and unofficial support for, and involvement in, piracy indicates that Parliamentary distinctions between legal and illegal commerce raiding (that is, privateering and piracy) were lost on large sectors of the public and the administration, both local and imperial. The British state’s attempt to extend its jurisdiction to the high seas and to monopolize the use of force there was undermined by the novelty of these presumptions, but also by the consistent state of war in the Atlantic. During the three “peaceful” decades between the end of the War of Spanish Succession and the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession, the Atlantic was, in fact, an official war zone for eleven years. This gave credence to the pervasive assumption that—Parliamentary anti-piracy legislation notwithstanding—there was no peace, no jurisdiction, and no law “beyond the line.” Moreover, during the course of the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–1720), the Anglo-Spanish War (1727–1729), and the War of Jenkin’s Ear (1739–1743), the warring European states expanded the scope of commerce raiding by encouraging pirates, through the sale of pardons and letters of marque, to serve as privateers. As chapter 1 illustrates, the naval campaign against piracy was more a public relations campaign than a naval effort. Enforcement at port, too,

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was dependably lax and compliant. Like contemporaries in Britain and North America, modern historians have recognized that colonial governors and other local officials routinely aided and abetted freebooters by providing them with capital, supplies, labor, and intelligence, as well as privateering commissions or royal pardons.103 These provincial officials were not, strictly speaking, corrupted into tolerating, encouraging, and participating in piracy. Even among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jurists, there was a lack of clarity regarding the illegality of piracy—what laws were violated and under what jurisdiction. Among the general public there was even less clarity on this issue. Local authorities merely shared and reflected the attitudes and will of their constituents in this respect. Freebooters were not part of an underground criminal subculture, or counterculture; they conducted their trade in the open and enjoyed material, civic, and political rewards for their service to their local economies, communities, and governments. Constituents of coastal communities saw these commerce raiders as conventional merchants and they resented and resisted efforts by imperial agents to hound and prosecute merchants, sea captains, and crews for engaging in commerce.104 These communities were eager to host, assist, and trade with freebooters, to forcibly protect them from arrest, and—in the rare occasion in which pirates were taken to court—to acquit them. The Board of Trade complained, in fact, that colonial courts and prosecutors were complicit in this effort by bringing piracy cases to trial before evidence was secured or by using other procedural maneuvers designed to ensure acquittal.105 Such practices were not unique to British courts; Spanish, French, and Dutch magistrates behaved similarly, as their constituents shared the commercial interests, cultural habits, and legal beliefs of British merchants and mariners.106 The insistence—by contemporary legislatures and by modern historians—on a true distinction between piracy and privateering impedes an accurate assessment of early modern commercial culture in the Atlantic World.107 Copious legislation flowed from European legislatures in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries insisting that piracy and privateering were altogether different activities. While this distinction was legally valid according to the civil law, it was culturally untrue and—according to common law—legally dubious. As Virginia Lunsford points out, the superficial dissimilarities between the two trades “dissolved

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into a seamless continuum of maritime predation.”108 Indeed, Mr. Chidley Brooke, collector of the King’s revenues and member of the New York Council (until he was removed from office by the newly appointed Governor Bellomont), explained that “giving protection to pirates had not formerly been looked upon as so great a matter[;] all the neighbouring Governments had done it commonly.”109 All evidence suggests that men like Brooke and Governor Fletcher, more than Governor Bellomont and Parliament, represented the public attitudes of their age regarding trade, predation, and law. Moreover, public attitudes on these matters remained constant in the century that followed Bellomont’s short-lived campaign against pirates, smugglers, and their confederates. Merchants, mariners, and others in Britain and its New World colonies continued to engage or participate in unrestricted freebooting, and actively resisted and frustrated metropolitan efforts to monopolize violence at sea and restrict armed commerce. And while the legal and commercial notion of “no peace beyond the line” was starting to change in the late eighteenth century, this change was evident only in governmental circles in London, not in British ports, nor in Ireland and the New World colonies, nor in the minds of ordinary Britons.110 In a 1795 scholarly study of the laws that governed privateering, Georg Friedrich de Martens points out that laws regulating privateering were “ill-observed” and that privateers routinely exceeded their legal bounds. Paraphrasing Voltaire, de Martens reminds his students and readers that these laws “seem to be made only to console people for the evils which politics and strength occasion; they give an idea of justice in the same manner as portraits give that of persons, whom we cannot behold.”111 This observation is a salient reminder to modern readers that, even in the late eighteenth century, prize law functioned as a facade, conjuring a semblance of order that contemporary merchants, vendors, laborers, and mariners did not perceive.

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3 Holding the Bag

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The Marine Insurance Industry’s Role in Perpetuating and Combating Piracy

The claim that merchants came to oppose piracy over time, as local economies stabilized, matured, and grew more integrated, as local merchants and trading firms increased their wealth and political influence, is based on the assumption that commerce raiding was harmful to trade and that the victims of maritime predation would be in the front of the pack working, or at least advocating and lobbying, for its suppression. Historians point to convoys—protective naval escorts—as an early example of successful lobbying by commercial interest groups for government action to protect merchant vessels from maritime predation, indicating a shift in public and mercantile attitudes and beliefs about piracy. In fact, however, the practice of insuring ships and cargoes against risks at sea insulated merchants and investors from much of the damage caused by armed commerce, while allowing them to continue reaping the benefits it offered. The fact that merchants sought security from risk—in the form of both naval protection and reimbursement from insurers—is not an indication that they were advocates of state regulation of maritime trade. Merchants, broadly considered, were not enemies of freebooting; while seeking protection, they nevertheless remained committed to retaining their traditional freedoms to conduct commerce as they had done in the past, both at sea and at port. Freebooting remained a profitable enterprise, which financiers, merchants, sailors, and laborers were eager to exploit. As shown elsewhere in this book, British and American 51

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communities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries continued to engage and invest in commerce raiding at sea, as they did in smuggling in coastal waters. Moreover, they did not internalize the definitions of the state as to legitimate and illegitimate commercial behavior. To modern observers in societies in which the state’s reach is entrenched and well defined, this seems contradictory, or at least intellectually inconsistent. Placing this commercial activity within the context of a war zone, and within a culture that valued localism over state consolidation, can explicate the internal logic that informed British and American attitudes toward freebooting. In an era in which the jurisdictional reach of government was in flux and, in many cases, more theoretical than real, contemporaries’ twin commitments to the legitimacy of predation and to protection from predators seem quite conventional, in fact. The relatively novel mechanism of marine insurance allowed financiers and merchants to yield profits from maritime predation, while protecting themselves against losses due to attacks at sea.1 Since insurance underwriters were the primary victims of piracy, then, it was the marine insurance sector, rather than the merchant class as a whole, that took the lead in lobbying national governments to mount anti-piracy campaigns—both naval and public relations—and endorsed metropolitan governments’ ideology of state; specifically, state jurisdiction at sea. The assumption that maritime predation would naturally make the merchant class receptive to governments’ anti-piracy initiatives is based on conjecture and not borne out by evidence. As demonstrated earlier, merchants and many others maintained their participation and complicity in commerce raiding during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the scope of privateering increased owing to unending warfare, and as the legalistic distinctions between privateering and piracy dissolved in practice into nonexistence, commerce raiding offered tremendous opportunities for riches to wealthy merchants and financiers, as well as sailors and other laborers and service providers. Moreover, analysis of Dutch and British wartime maritime trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicates that piracy and privateering did not cut that deeply into merchants’ profits. The data suggest that despite the costs associated with risks to shipping in times of war— losses from hijacked or damaged cargoes and higher costs of freight and

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insurance—wartime profits were greater, if less predictable, than in peace.2 It is quite likely that the harmful effects of war and commerce raiding on overall trade are overstated, as losses suffered by merchants were mitigated by marine insurance and offset both by heightened demand and by the profits they drew from engaging or investing in freebooting ventures. This explains why British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and other merchants lobbied governments to maintain and expand the scope of privateering. Commerce raiding held the prospect of instant wealth for enterprising captains and their crews, for their employers, for their employers’ backers, and for trading partners at port and beyond. Merchants gained more by it than they lost.3 One should keep in mind also that cargoes captured by marauders at sea were not consumed on board ship or otherwise eliminated from the marketplace. Pirates made their living on shore, by selling stolen goods to intricate networks of merchants, smugglers, fences, silversmiths, government officials, innkeepers, and the like. Maritime predation, therefore, was not a hindrance to trade, but an adrenalin shot for local economies; a central and integral part of a vast and burgeoning black market for stolen goods. It provided cheap merchandise to consumers, merchants and governments.4 It is inaccurate, therefore, to portray pirates as the enemies of commerce or of merchants, consumers, and governors.5 At times they could be the trading partners or clients of governors and merchants; and at all times they stimulated trade by providing local governments, merchants, and consumers a wide variety of cheap, tax-free goods—from foodstuffs, spices, tea, and spirits, to textiles, slaves, military stores, and tools. As Jack Greene points out, merchants, financiers, smugglers, and pirates, as well as the general public that supported them and benefited from their trade, were part of a social continuum in the British Empire. They all shared in, and shaped, the materialistic, commercial, and exploitative mentality that characterized British consumer culture.6 The dramatic diversification of Atlantic trade during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was, to a significant degree, facilitated by the vast quantities of cheap contraband brought to British and New World markets by freebooters and smugglers. It was the cheap cost of raw and manufactured imports that explains the widening distribution of such goods. Studies of early modern Anglo-American consumer culture speak to the insatiable appetite of British consumers for imports and illustrate

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how a wide variety of imported goods from all over the world found its way not only into the homes of the wealthy, but also to backcountry homes and stores in North America.7 Freebooting offered highly lucrative jobs for sailors and other laborers in coastal towns and villages (while a common sailor earned roughly £16 a year, if fully employed, a sailor on a privateer or pirate ship could earn hundreds of pounds per voyage);8 it infused vast amounts of hard currency into local economies, bestowed political and pecuniary benefits on cooperative local officials, and provided captains and investors with handsome windfall profits. The occasional declaration of peace, with the resultant dwindling of new privateering commissions, did not change these incentives. Moreover, since peacetime commerce was understood as an aspect of international competition in this mercantilist era, those private agents who engaged in undermining rival states’ commercial and economic growth could expect tacit approval—and lax law enforcement—from their own governments.9 British merchants saw commerce raiding as a fantastic financial opportunity and, rather than working to challenge the legality, legitimacy, and prevalence of freebooting, they routinely traded in pirated goods and outfitted and invested in piratical ventures, such as the pirate colony in Madagascar, which targeted maritime trade in the Indian Ocean.10 If the scale of piracy in the 1710s, immediately after the War of Spanish Succession, led to increased pressure from commercial interest groups on Parliament to protect British shipping, the Hobbesian state of war in the Atlantic throughout most of the eighteenth century actually alleviated merchants’ concerns over financial losses due to piracy. For although marine insurance rates and sailors’ wages rose during times of war to meet the increased risks to life and property at sea, these expenses were offset by the benefits presented by a wartime economy: government contracts, rising retail prices (caused by increased demand, especially in blockaded enemy ports),11 and profitable commerce raiding.12 Thus by mid-eighteenth century Parliament’s legislative campaign against piracy waned owing to a combination of the government’s increased need for pirates’ services and the commercial sector’s decreased anxiety over pirate-related losses. The outbreak, in rapid succession, of the War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, and the War of American Independence intensified these dynamics, as these global wars

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made Britain’s need for privateers even more acute than before, while presenting British merchants with more opportunities for profits.13 Moreover, financing Britain’s bloated national debt, which nearly doubled from one war to the next (due to massive military and naval spending), offered more opportunities for men of wealth to profit from the wartime economy.14 Maritime predation offered merchants, financiers, and ship owners opportunities to recoup losses incurred by piratical attacks, but they also sought to shield themselves from such risks with marine insurance and protective convoys. Naval vessels in the eighteenth century were utilized defensively, for the most part, as armed escorts for merchant vessels, rather than being sent on search-and-destroy missions (see chapter 1), since—as Admiral Edward Vernon pointed out—sending a warship to capture a pirate vessel was like sending a cow to capture a hare. When acting offensively against commerce raiders, they usually targeted stationary targets (ships at port), since speed was not on the navy’s side until the advent of steam engines.15 Although protected convoys were effective in reducing the risk of losses at sea,16 they did not engender much enthusiasm on the part of merchants. Ships often remained at port waiting for a convoy to materialize and naval escorts to arrive. (It was not uncommon, in fact, for naval escorts to delay because they themselves were engaged in trade in foreign ports.) Meanwhile, merchantmen’s costs for provisions and wages mounted, while profits from beating other vessels to market diminished. Perishable cargoes, naturally, represented further disincentives for convoying, as did various fees that were sometimes charged for the service.17 Merchants regularly chose to risk the loss of their cargoes to freebooters rather than take advantage of the protection offered by naval escorts and the low premiums offered by insurance underwriters to convoyed shipping.18 That they did so substantiates claims regarding the profitability of trade despite high levels of maritime predation. While losses to pirates and privateers were merely possible, convoying represented losses that were certain and predictable. Convoying was a well-established practice by the early eighteenth century, offered to merchants in both wartime and peace.19 But convoys worked more smoothly in trades that were monopolized. The large sums paid in import duties by commercial giants like the Dutch and English

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East India Companies or the Levant Company gave national governments a strong incentive to protect company ships.20 In trades that were more competitive and less centralized—especially in wartime economies that routinely featured sharp spikes in demand—profits depended on arriving to market first, before convoyed vessels arrived at port simultaneously, thus flooding local markets and lowering retail prices. In this context, convoys represented considerable disincentives for merchants, which is why both underwriters and the central government attempted, respectively, to coax and coerce merchants into convoying. Insurers did so by offering lower premiums to merchants who chose to partake, while governments attempted coercion through legislation and the imposition of a tax to fund naval convoys.21 Marine insurance was certainly the more effective and more common measure adopted by merchants to insulate themselves from the effects of piracy (as well as all other perils of the sea). Whereas in the late seventeenth century most merchant vessels sailed uninsured, by the 1720s insuring cargoes and ships had become the norm. By the mid-eighteenth century, London had eclipsed Amsterdam as the center of the global marine insurance market.22 Britain’s marine insurance industry, offering several million pounds in insurance annually, consisted of Lloyd’s (a market for private insurance underwriting) and two licensed insurance companies, the Royal Exchange and the London Assurance Company. The spectacular growth of the marine insurance market, declining rates, and the resultant widespread practice of insuring ships and cargoes allowed British, Dutch, French, and American merchants to make money from piracy (by investing in piracy as owners, shareholders, and trading partners, if not also by actually being pirates) while limiting their own piracy-related losses. Underwriters understood that merchants, ship owners, and captains were routinely reckless—breaking convoy when they neared destination ports, or traveling without the benefit of convoy altogether—precisely because they insured up to 99 percent of the value of their ships and cargoes.23 Moreover, ransoming—the increasingly common practice of freebooters charging their victims a fee on the spot, rather than taking possession of the ship or cargo—further undermined merchants’ incentive for caution and self-preservation, while increasing underwriter liability. Ransom could be paid in coin or given in the form of a ransom bill,

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accompanied by a hostage or two, to be released when the ransom bill was paid.24 A per-diem fee for hostages’ food and lodging was added to the sum specified on the ransom bill.25 A rare court case involved a suit brought by a French privateer against a British ship that refused to pay the ransom bill and redeem its hostage from his imprisonment in France, where the bewildered captor had to provide for the sustenance of his prisoner from his own pocket.26 While freebooters gained less by ransoming than by confiscating a prize, it allowed them to remain at sea, taking an unlimited number of prizes in a single voyage, rather than hauling their plunder to market (or to a prize court). Similarly, ransoming was preferable to merchants and ship owners, who could pay the ransom, bring their goods to market, avoid lengthy and risky proceedings in prize court, and even collect a portion of their loss from their insurers. It was therefore common for merchants to instruct shipmasters to pay ransom up to a certain amount if captured. Insurance underwriters, as well, willingly paid a share of the ransom, since they lost less by it than they would by the seizure of the entire ship or cargo.27 Thus insurance insulated merchants from the financial toll of commerce raiding and eliminated incentives to avoid dangerous waters, sail in convoy, or invest in other defensive measures (for example, increasing a ship’s number of guns and crew members, at the expense of cargo). The habit of insuring ships, therefore, actually increased the prevalence of seizures at sea and even provided incentives for collusion between merchants and pirates for the purpose of collecting insurance on “lost” ships and cargoes.28 An 1822 report from Havana, for example, pointed to American merchants setting to sea with insured goods, while also outfitting piratical vessels themselves. Once robbed by these pirates (to which crew members, who were left in the dark regarding the deceit, offered sincere and sworn accounts), the owners were able to bring the cargo to market and also collect the full insurance payment.29 Since insurance providers had assumed virtually all the risk of shipping cargoes across the Atlantic from the merchants who owned the insured vessels and freight, these underwriters came to bear the financial brunt of losses at sea. Just as risks at sea drove merchants to embrace ma­ rine insurance, these same risks similarly drew insurers to inventive techniques of their own to motivate crews, captains, merchants, ship owners,

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and governments to reduce the incidence of insurance claims. Insurers in both the Netherlands and Britain used a variety of counterincentives to motivate owners, masters, and crews to exert their own efforts to reduce losses at sea. Underwriters offered lower premiums for cargoes traveling under convoy protection or refunded a portion of the premium to an owner whose ship arrived safely at its destination. They also bestowed honors (such as toasts and public addresses of celebration and gratitude), awards (plaques, cups, or free admission to Lloyd’s Rooms), and financial rewards on captains and crews who evaded freebooters or defended their ships when attacked. These tributes were offered even when crews were eventually unsuccessful in preventing the capture of their ships.30 Such countermeasures were deemed necessary because merchants often offered ship captains financial incentives to break free of the convoy and travel without escort. Naval officers and Admiralty officials repeatedly defended against criticism in the press about the Royal Navy’s inability to protect the merchant marine, explaining that ship captains breaking convoy, rather than the navy, were to blame for violent seizures at sea.31 In rare cases, underwriters even resorted to taking matters into their own hands. In 1745 a group of Dutch insurers from Curaçao sent a delegation to New York to initiate legal proceedings against British privateers, and in 1819 several insurance companies in Malta outfitted, at their joint expense, a vessel to hunt down a British pirate operating in the Mediterranean.32 The primary effort taken by underwriters and insurance firms to minimize losses, however, was lobbying power brokers in royal courts and national legislatures to both fund and mandate convoy protection, but also to spur strong naval action against pirates, including renegade privateers and coastal wreckers. The increasing severity of punishments stipulated by law for such offenses indicates that these endeavors were successful in producing legislation, if not in actually changing commercial practices at sea and in coastal towns. In 1780 and again at the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, the lobbying efforts emanating from Lloyd’s of London led to Parliamentary legislation requiring all British vessels conducting foreign trade to sail in convoys protected by British men of war (unless given an explicit exemption by the Admiralty). To this end, underwriters at Lloyd’s and the London Assurance Company provided Parliament with statistics relating the undeniable effectiveness of convoys in protect-

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ing merchantmen from attack (and reducing the number of insurance claims).33 At different times in the eighteenth century, Dutch and French governments also required all merchant vessels to travel with naval convoy, with severe penalties on noncompliant shipmasters and owners. Under the late Stuarts, at the turn of the eighteenth century, England saw the emergence of energized, innovative, and increasingly large lobbying enterprises. Policy-related lobbying became more common as it became more effective in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—since the central government appeared to be more attentive and responsive to public pressure, it paid to invest more in lobbying.34 Because marine insurance was a rich trade and one that required large amounts of liquid capital, underwriters were well positioned and equipped to bring influence to bear on government officials. The London Assurance was particularly influential, politically, from the early eighteenth century on, since it offered the ministry much-needed loans to cover its wartime operating costs.35 A notable example of successful lobbying on the part of the marine insurance industry was the Marine Insurance Act of 1746. This law prohibited parties with no financial stake in a ship or cargo from taking out insurance on it; it also voided policies taken by noninterested parties. This was an attempt to end the practice of using marine insurance policies to gamble on the destruction or capture of a merchantman. In times of war in particular, when risks at sea spiked, this practice represented a lucrative investment opportunity for third parties. In the early stages of the growth of the marine insurance industry, in both the Netherlands and in England, interest groups within the industry had sought the passage of laws compelling all merchants engaged in overseas trade to purchase insurance.36 This effort was energetically resisted and defeated by the merchant class, but this episode nevertheless highlights the divergent interests of insurers and merchants with regard to maritime trade.37 This divergence was evident also in the two groups’ attitudes toward commerce raiding. While merchants and others continued to enthusiastically draw profits from freebooting and its attendant trades in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, insurance firms and independent underwriters lobbied for government action against commerce raiders—pursuit at sea, preemptive patrols, protective convoys, energetic prosecution, and harsh punishment. Such action had become a

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more pressing need for insurers from the early eighteenth century on, as growing competition in the insurance market led to consistently reduced rates (see chapter 1), thus cutting deep into underwriters’ profits. Insurers hoped to reverse this trend and improve profit margins by reducing the incidence of attacks at sea. Particularly appealing, in this respect, was the fact that efforts to curb maritime predation (and reduce underwriters’ losses) would be taken at the government’s expense. By the early nineteenth century, insurance underwriters were accustomed to pressing Parliament for action, and Lloyd’s reports on piracies were routinely passed on to the Admiralty.38 The same dynamic can be observed in the United States in the nineteenth century. An examination of petitions from the business community requesting federal action against pirates in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic reveals that they originated, in fact, from the insurance community. An 1819 petition by six presidents of Boston insurance firms to President James Monroe, published in the National Intelligencer on January 1, 1820, informed Monroe of numerous “piracies and unlawful acts of armed vessels, committed, in many instances near our coast, or in the W. India seas, and some of them . . . by vessels out of our own ports.” In 1824 and 1829, as well, insurers (both firms and individual underwriters) contacted federal or naval authorities to report on continued piratical attacks, complain about weak law enforcement enabling such attacks, and request governmental remedy.39 The establishment of the New York Board, a body representing the city’s marine insurance underwriters and dedicated to regulating premiums and standardizing underwriting procedures, was truly consequential in this regard. First, it led to the formation of similar collective associations in other large port cities, such as Boston and Philadelphia. These boards then used their resources and clout in the early and mid-nineteenth century to further the interests of underwriters; specifically, they aimed to reduce underwriter losses.40 To combat losses from fraudulent claims and criminal wrecking, they pressed for the appointment of honest (that is, sympathetic) federal judges and prosecutors, sponsored and subsidized a coastal telegraph line (the New York Board helped launch the American Telegraph Company, which eventually became AT&T), and sponsored coastal lifesaving stations, which were also responsible for protecting shipwrecked cargoes and crews from wreckers and looters.

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These boards—at times independently, at times in concert—actively lobbied state and federal legislatures for regulations to improve piloting standards, helped finance improvements to piloting services, petitioned and otherwise pressured local and federal authorities for navigation aids such as coastal lighting or lighting ships, helped finance the Federal Revenue Cutters Service (a precursor to the US Coast Guard), petitioned Congress to fund and conduct updated surveys of dangerous coastal waters, printed and distributed (at the boards’ expense) updated navigation charts, and promoted the adoption of “rules of the road” to help captains avoid collisions. They also sought US naval protection for merchant shipping against commerce raiding.41 Like Dutch and English insurers in the previous two centuries, American insurance providers understood that underwriter profit margins were shrinking because of competition and lower premiums, on the one hand, and continued losses at sea, on the other. Like their European counterparts, American boards focused on measures designed to reduce the latter. Such efforts reflected a recognition that marine insurance relieved ship owners, merchants, and captains of the responsibility and expense of defending their own cargoes at sea. Since insurers now bore the cost of losses at sea, they attempted to limit their liability by having these cargoes protected by naval patrols and convoys. In Britain, as well, underwriter associations—most prominently at Lloyd’s—continued to use their influence to obtain from the Admiralty protective convoys for British shipping, and to urge the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, and the courts to respond more vigorously to piratical depredations in the Atlantic.42 Underwriters at Lloyd’s also took the lead in orchestrating well-publicized charitable collections on behalf of British naval officers, sailors, and their families, which contributed to a more amiable and cooperative relationship between the Admiralty and commercial interest groups. The Admiralty’s commitment to protect British shipping received positive press coverage in commercial centers, such as London, Bristol, and Hull, which had a similar effect, bolstering the popularity of supportive Admiralty officials and the public standing of those merchants and members of Parliament who had petitioned the government for convoy escorts. These port towns repeatedly voted to fund the recruitment of seamen for the Royal Navy by offering bounties for volunteers and setting up schools to train “vagrant boys” for service in the navy. These patriotic measures

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alleviated the navy’s manpower needs and thus enabled merchants both to protect their own ship crews from impressment and to curb the upsurge in sailors’ wages. Such fundraising drives (as well as sponsorship for monuments and memorials, and conspicuous contributions to naval charities such as widows-and-orphans funds) also allowed merchants to establish genteel credentials as benefactors of the navy.43 The cooperative relationship promoted and sponsored by the insurance industry between the Admiralty and commercial interest groups was certainly economically and politically beneficial for the financial and mercantile sectors, as merchants and manufacturers grew increasingly dependent on long-distance trade during the course of the eighteenth century.44 But royal administrations supported commerce protection not only because of organized lobbying from the marine insurance industry and the large trading firms (usually through Parliament and the press). Self-interest was a motivating factor as well, given that secure trade generated tax revenues for the British Treasury in the form of customs duties. Regular revenues from indirect taxes (namely customs and excise) were particularly important in Parliament’s management of Britain’s finances. As Parliament extended its control over the state’s finances following the Glorious Revolution, it employed innovative techniques to fund the national debt, which was swelled by wartime spending throughout the eighteenth century. For example, Britain imposed indirect taxes on particular imports and consumer goods to fund specific debt bonds. Such techniques enabled Parliament to reduce the unfunded portion of the national debt consistently during the course of the century (from 100 percent before the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, to 70 percent in 1700, to less than 10 percent at the end of the century), although this made the effective redemption of debt bonds dependent on effective and steady tax collection of customs and excise duties.45 To achieve this, the British state bulked up its revenue collection agencies during the course of the eighteenth century. Whereas tax collection in the seventeenth century had been farmed out to private contractors, in the eighteenth century the state took firm control of this function. The number of full-time employees in the revenue departments rose consistently during the century, as did the Treasury’s income from indirect taxation.46 The share of revenues from direct taxes (primarily on the land holdings of the landed elite) actually declined—from 40 percent at

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the turn of the eighteenth century to under 20 percent at its close—as indirect taxes contributed a greater share of the government’s growing income. Customs revenues habitually declined in wartime, as a result of widespread commerce raiding and illegal trade, fluctuating between 20 and 30 percent of total tax income throughout the century. In absolute terms, however, annual customs revenues rose consistently, from £1.5 million to £6.7 million between 1700 and 1801, as the government’s net income rose from £4.3 million to £31.5 million.47 The transition to direct tax collection by the government, through its revenue departments, began in the late seventeenth century (before the Glorious Revolution) and intensified thereafter.48 The benefit of the previous system of tax collection, under which private contractors paid the government a fixed rate for the privilege of collecting the tax, was that it ensured the Treasury a fixed annual income, regardless of actual collection returns. This allowed Treasury officials to prepare budgets based on income and expenditure estimates. Yet even though farming out tax collection to private contractors offered the government a steady income and allowed it to avoid collection expenses, it also linked the Crown with these collectors’ predatory public image. More important, it prevented the state from taking advantage of its expanding tax base. Thus legal and organizational reforms under the late Stuarts empowered the Treasury to collect its own revenues. The growing effectiveness and regularity of British tax collection from the late seventeenth century on enabled the Treasury to borrow at lower interest rates, facilitating the growth of the national credit (from £20 million to £240 million over the course of the eighteenth century).49 These trends in Britain’s tax policies—in particular, the absolute and relative growth in revenues from indirect taxation—indicate that the Treasury’s ability to manage the debt (that is, to pay interest dividends and thereby gain access to more credit) rested on the compliance of a relatively small circle of merchants and manufacturers who paid the excise and customs duties and then recovered these losses by raising retail prices. The Admiralty’s willingness to expend its resources on commerce protection, then, represented an investment by the government in its own customs revenues (since cargoes that reached British ports legally were subject to customs duties) and reflected the credit-hungry Treasury’s growing dependence on the merchant class. The fact that it was these

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same merchants, manufacturers, and financiers (including insurance firms and underwriters) who extended credit to the government and received lucrative state contracts to supply the army and navy explains the growing willingness of this commercial and financial elite to acquiesce, in time, to increased rates of taxation. Thus in 1798, when Parliament imposed a convoy tax (in the form of a tonnage duty) to fund escorts for commercial convoys, it elicited neither criticism nor noncompliance from the large trading firms and established merchant families. This merchant elite was indeed praised in government-sponsored publications for its patriotic willingness to shoulder the nation’s tax burden.50 The fact that merchants wanted protection from pirates and reimbursement from insurance companies should not suggest to modern observers that merchants were naturally inclined toward and supportive of the state’s endeavors to outlaw and delegitimize freebooting as a commercial practice. On land, as well, eighteenth-century Britons did not want to be robbed on city streets, but they still overwhelmingly opposed the creation of police forces, seeing them as a violation of English liberties and of inherited custom. Merchants retained a traditional understanding of common law and accepted practice, one that held maritime commerce as armed commerce. Thus they invested in risk-mitigation schemes, such as risk-sharing agreements with other merchants, naval escorts, and marine insurance. Throughout, they continued to engage and invest in commerce raiding and contraband trade, and there is little indication of them internalizing the definitions of the state as to legitimate and illegitimate commercial behavior. Nor did they, as a general rule, accept the state’s jurisdiction to do so. Factoring in piracy-related losses against profits from freebooting and legal and illegal trade, long-distance commerce remained a lucrative enterprise for merchants, especially in wartime, when maritime predation was at its highest. The growth of a robust marine insurance market that offered relatively low rates enabled British and American merchants to draw profits from piracy and pirated goods while reducing piracy-related losses by insuring their cargoes and ships. Since insurance underwriters, more than merchants and ship owners, were the ones absorbing piracy-related losses, they actively lobbied the

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governments of both Britain and, later, the United States, for anti-piracy activism at sea and in court, and for a naval policy of commerce protection (through patrols and protective convoys). They also offered merchants and crews various incentives to avail themselves of convoy protection or otherwise protect their cargoes. Finally, they underwrote other initiatives—both privately and in cooperation with the Coast Guard—to improve and secure maritime navigation. A policy of commerce protection, coupled with patriotic public relations efforts by the Admiralty, the merchant elite, and the marine insurance industry, strengthened financial and social ties between the merchant and manufacturing community, the Admiralty, and the Treasury.51 This two-pronged approach served, in time, to generate a sense of partnership and confluence of interests and ideology between merchants, the state, and insurance underwriters. Modern attitudes toward commerce raiding, smuggling, and state jurisdiction at port and sea indicate just how successful this effort was in the long run. But it was not so in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when economic and diplomatic conditions made piracy and smuggling highly profitable to practitioners and useful to consumers, and when cultural mores and legal beliefs made them widely acceptable and even respectable.

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4 Smuggling

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Armed Commerce and the Severe Limits of State Enforcement and Persuasion

“Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.” Like these intertidal zones, communities at the water’s edge are partially of the sea. Coastal villages and port towns were the point of contact between maritime commercial activities and the more ordered commerce of landed communities. Indeed, they exhibited the friction between the lawless, violent nature of seaborne trade and the law enforcement initiatives of landed governments. The ocean was a wild frontier, at odds with the civilizing effects of the civil law and beyond the effective jurisdiction of courts. As integral participants in maritime trade, coastal communities reflected the values, ideologies, legal beliefs, and commercial conventions of Atlantic merchants and mariners. An examination of the prevalence and legitimacy of smuggling in British and American ports reinforces observations (noted in chapters 1 and 2) on the vast distance between the Parliamentary and Court conception of law and state jurisdiction and that of Britons at large. Moreover, it is crucial for the study of piracy, as smuggling and piracy were sister industries, with smuggling networks responsible for the profitability of piratical trade. Indeed, the factors that led to the decline in the scope of customs evasion toward the mid-nineteenth century inevitably occasioned a decline in the prevalence of freebooting as well. 66

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The early modern public and legal discourse on smuggling shared many of the dynamics and characteristics as that on commerce raiding. The assertive rhetoric of law-and-order and the state-centered juridical logic generated in the halls of Parliament, in Whitehall, and in the courts did not reflect commercial realities at sea and at port. It certainly clashed with Britons’ beliefs regarding law, the central government’s jurisdiction, governmental legitimacy, and the nature of commerce. Scholarly studies of smuggling in Britain, British America, and the United States—more than accounts of commerce raiding—reflect an awareness of the competing ethical and ideological frameworks that informed early modern commercial and governmental attitudes and actions. Modern historians of smuggling recognize that coastal and seafaring communities did not accept the state’s claim to legal and moral authority. These historians, therefore, are more likely to guard against using the verbiage, logic, and ideological assumptions of Parliament and the courts to describe and analyze smugglers and their accomplices. The records indicate that illegal trade—like piracy—flourished during the long eighteenth century, fueled by wartime economies and high tariffs. When bringing goods to market, smugglers enjoyed a clear advantage over importers who paid the full import duties in compliance with Parliamentary legislation: smugglers could sell their wares cheaply, whereas legal importers had to add the cost of import taxes to the retail price in order to make a profit. The mechanism by which governments aim to negate this clear incentive to violate the law is harsh and effective enforcement—levying financial and other penalties as disincentives for tax evasion. In early modern Britain, however, the central government’s effort proved unequal to the task. Despite ratcheting up the legal, administrative, and public relations campaigns against smugglers and their minions, and despite the increased severity of penalties imposed on those convicted, the government did not curtail the volume of smuggling. In fact, the scope of illegal trade actually increased. The campaign to suppress and delegitimize smuggling, though not successful, offered agents of state authority an opportunity to articulate—through legislation, government proclamations and publications, and the exertions of supportive constituents—an ideology of law and a vision of the modern state. This vision, like the anti-smuggling efforts of the central government, was actively and successfully resisted by

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British subjects—high and low—who clung to a more traditional and archaic view of society, state, and law. This resistance was prompted and fueled by economic self-interest (a quest for profits, that is) but also by the backward-looking, traditional, localist worldview of wide swaths of British society. Like freebooters, smugglers enjoyed widespread local support and cooperation from local laborers, traders, magistrates, and leading families. This support was the key factor in frustrating the efforts of the central government to apprehend, punish, and deter smugglers. Toward the midnineteenth century, however, the scope of smuggling in Britain declined, as did the scope of piracy. This was not due to effective policing of British coasts, but—as was the case with the decline of Atlantic piracy—to new economic and commercial conditions. Just as constant war and high tariffs (enacted to finance wartime spending) transformed small-scale smuggling into a major industry and a pillar of local economies throughout Britain and North America, so the arrival of a stable and lasting peace, as well as reduced tariffs, brought about its diminution. Governor Bellomont of New York complained that piracy and illegal trade were the beloved twins of the merchant class in America. Indeed, it is evident that piracy and smuggling were attendant trades, with the former inevitably and heavily reliant on the latter.1 Robbery at sea was financially rewarding because goods captured onboard ships—meats, coal, tobacco, salt, slaves, sugar, timber, butter, grain, firearms and munitions, salted fish, exotic and lucrative spices, spirits, textiles, precious metals and stones, oil, and so forth—were brought ashore without going through customs and sold through a network of merchants, silversmiths, and fences to retailers and consumers. Of course, the captured ships themselves, with all their equipment and rigging, were also valuable to both robbers and their trading partners in port towns. Piracy was doubtless economically, politically, and socially beneficial for merchants and for officials in imperial and colonial administration. But because it inevitably involved smuggling, it denied the British Treasury customs revenues, which were essential to Parliament’s management of the government’s mounting debt.2 This concern about customs revenue is illustrated in the charges brought in 1698 against Benjamin Fletcher, Bellomont’s predecessor as governor of New York. Fletcher was

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accused of selling commissions and protection to known pirates, accepting gifts from them, releasing and returning seized property to suspected pirates, and conniving “at illegal trade, whereby the revenue of New York has been diminished though the trade has increased.”3 The close relation between commerce raiding and illegal trade was well recognized by contemporaries in the golden age of piracy and of smuggling. Governor Francis Nicholson of Maryland reported on the far-reaching smuggling operations of pirates based in Pennsylvania; he pointed out the vast web of support they enjoyed in America, drawing funding from a wide network of investors in Pennsylvania (including investors of relatively modest means) and manpower from neighboring colonies. He offers similar observations on smugglers and the pirate trade in the Carolinas. A 1698 letter to the East India Company similarly linked piracies in the Indian Ocean to New York merchants engaged in illegal trade.4 The conviction that piracy and smuggling were attendant crimes drove New York’s Governor Bellomont to complain to the Lords of the Admiralty that his constituents were “bent and united to oppose all Government which shall interfere with their illegal trade and their piracy.” He was trying at the time to thwart efforts by New York merchants to orchestrate the reappointment of Benjamin Fletcher, who had been more accepting, if not also supportive, of merchants’ penchant for piracy and illegal trade.5 Bellomont’s anti-piracy campaign inevitably led him to pursue smuggling rings as well, but he recorded only limited and fleeting success on both fronts.6 The navigation acts were routinely and openly ignored throughout the British New World during times of war, as well as in the brief intervals of peace. All of England’s colonial possessions, without exception, were targets of official complaints about hospitality toward smugglers in the late seventeenth century.7 Ignoring anti-piracy legislation went hand in hand with such widespread engagement in smuggling and other forms of illegal trade. In the eighteenth century, as the practice of carrying privateering commissions became widespread, turning American and European waters into frenzied hunting grounds for freebooters, career smugglers became licensed privateers. Privateers’ involvement in contraband trade with the enemy and in smuggling was not a fringe phenomenon; it was commonplace, rather than exceptional.8 In fact, a 1758 Memorial of the Commissioners of the Customs recommended that letters of marque issued to

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small vessels be called in, and no more issued, as these were being used as a cover for smuggling and piracy.9 The pairing of these trades—commerce raiding and customs evasion—remained a natural and common one during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.10 As the US government got involved in suppression efforts, especially following the War of 1812, it too recognized that piracy and smuggling were inevitably intertwined. In 1820, the US Senate received a report on piracy in the Gulf of Mexico from the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, in which the committee stressed that, since the federal government’s main source of revenue (roughly 90 percent) was duties on imports, targeting piracy was critical to proper enforcement of import duties.11 Similarly, an 1824 congressional report on piracy near Cuba and Puerto Rico pointed out that Cuban authorities needed to crack down on smugglers and fences at port to make any headway in a future campaign against piracy.12 While there is disagreement on the accuracy of measurements and estimates of the scope of smuggling in the eighteenth century,13 it is widely accepted that it was enormous, representing a monumental share of overall trade—up to 50 percent by some estimates. Moreover, the eighteenth century saw an expansion in the “market share” of illegal trade, as well as an increase in the brazenness and violence involved in smuggling, despite the ongoing governmental campaign to suppress this trade.14 One must also keep in mind, when assessing the scope and volume of smuggling, that to the impressive statistics regarding outright smuggling one must also add customs fraud—false declaration of weight and volume of imported goods.15 A Parliamentary inquiry in 1745 found that 3 million pounds of tea— three times the amount legally imported—was smuggled into Britain annually. Official and unofficial estimates for the 1760s, ’70s, and ’80s show that the amounts of smuggled tea had doubled to 6–7 million pounds annually. Indeed, “fair-traders” (importers who paid full customs duties) often mixed other substances, such as ash and dyed sloe leaves, into the tea they sold in order to compete with the cheap tea sold by smugglers (who referred to themselves as “free traders”). This practice moved Parliament to enact, in 1777, an “Act for the more effectual Prevention of the manufacturing of Ash, Elder, Sloe and other Leaves, in Imitation of Tea.” In the case of spirits and tobacco, contemporary estimates were as dire, with a late eighteenth-century Parliamentary report estimating that 50

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percent of spirits consumed in Britain were smuggled into the country. In 1777, by contemporary accounts, roughly 2.5 million gallons of Geneva gin were smuggled into Britain from Dunkirk alone.16 What sustained and encouraged the smuggling industry was high taxation on imports, combined with lax or inefficient customs enforcement. And since some goods—such as English wool—were subject to export taxes, a smuggling enterprise came into being in the export trade as well.17 Studies indicate that the smuggling trade peaked in Britain in the 1730s and ’40s and during the War of American Independence, but that it remained at high levels in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during and after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.18 Because these constant wars led to rising retail prices, increased taxation and less effective customs enforcement,19 smugglers were able to generate tremendous wealth through customs evasion—estimates range from 100 percent to 500 percent in profits, depending on the market.20 The war-related demands on the Treasury shaped not only the commercial behavior of merchants but also the fiscal policies of Britain’s trading partners. While the tax on tea in Britain, for example, rose to 119 percent by the end of the American War, import taxes on the Continent remained relatively stable. This allowed French, Dutch, and other merchants to import tea and export it to Britain for huge profits. European markets imported roughly 15 million pounds of tea annually in the late eighteenth century, but consumed only 5 million pounds; the remaining 10 million were exported to Britain. Similarly, the tax on manufactured tobacco in Britain rose precipitously during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and persisted thereafter at 1,100 percent, whereas the tobacco tax in Holland remained at 2 percent. Such Continental tax policies allowed—or, in the age of mercantilist competition, encouraged— European merchants to import tobacco for the express purpose of smuggling it into Britain.21 Not only were these Continental exporters denying the British Treasury customs revenues, but by enriching themselves they also helped draw hard currency out of the British economy. The high import tax on tobacco offered both an incentive and a justification for smuggling. In the early nineteenth century, merchants—foreign and domestic—smuggled 20 million pounds of tobacco every year into Britain.22 Estimates suggest that in North America (in the colonial and early national eras) smuggling was at least as pervasive as it was in

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Britain, if not more so. The tea market in British America, for example, was virtually untaxed, because only 10–15 percent of the tea consumed in America had been legally imported.23 Smuggling was endemic also in French and Spanish New World possessions, where merchants and local officials were likewise complicit and active in the contraband trade, in defiance of royal authority and policies.24 The smuggling industry, and the black market it supported, comprised a key component of the British economy throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, providing not only cheap goods for consumers throughout the British Empire, but also good jobs for many inhabitants in coastal communities. In fact, farms in southern England experienced labor shortages caused by the expanding labor demands of the smuggling trade; this forced farmers to raise wages during the harvest season to lure back workers from the coast to the land.25 The public proved highly resistant to governmental efforts to present smugglers as thieving malefactors. They were, in practical terms, the backbone of many local economies, if not also of the imperial economy. Primary accounts from both sides of the law indicate that, as late as the early nineteenth century, the smuggling trade involved tens of thousands in Britain alone—sailors, dock workers, transporters, hawkers, and retailers, connecting Britain’s smuggling coasts with inland populations—and was carried out in the open, in defiance of Parliamentary and royal authorities, and with widespread support from the populace and local officials.26 As is the case with anti-piracy legislation and actual piracy, anti-smuggling statutes and rhetoric should not lead one to assume that an energetic, consistent, brutal, and effective suppression campaign was under way against smugglers and their accomplices in eighteenth-century Britain. Anti-smuggling laws grew harsher and the definition of smuggling broader as the century wore on. By midcentury, smuggling was designated a capital offense, enticing bounties and pardons were advertised for willing informants, and customs officers were empowered to aggressively pursue violators of these newly minted laws. Imperial authorities made an effort to publicize the official zero-tolerance policy toward smugglers and their accomplices through proclamations and stark demonstrations—bodies of convicted smugglers were left hanging at strategic points along trade routes so that the gruesome sight (and smell) might deter British subjects from this career path.27

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Yet despite these law enforcement tactics and public relations techniques, the central government’s efforts to eradicate smuggling failed to deter Britons from the trade or reduce the scope of this burgeoning market. Woefully outnumbered by active smuggling crews, customs agents in Britain—and even more so in Britain’s colonies—were too dispersed and marginalized to do their job effectively throughout the early modern era. As customs duties rose, the ranks of illegal traders swelled, and at a faster pace than those of customs agents.28 By 1730 gangs of smugglers and their associates in polite society (including local governments, the courts, and the customs houses) had established complete control of British coastlines. Only in the 1820s and ’30s would the British government begin to establish direct control over British ports and coasts and to challenge smuggling enterprises with sufficient manpower and force—the Preventive Water Guard and Royal Navy maintained a coastal blockade along England’s southern coast during and after the Napoleonic Wars, until 1831 when the Coastguard was charged with such duties.29 The scope of smuggling remained robust in the first half of the nineteenth century (as did import and export taxes), but more aggressive and consistent customs enforcement in the south of England did drive smuggling underground. If in the eighteenth century illegal trade was conducted in the open, by day, with little fear of arrest and reprisals, nineteenthcentury smugglers relied more heavily on stealth (although unconcealed daytime landings were still reported as late as the 1830s).30 Not only were customs officers too few, too isolated, and too marginalized in port towns to be effective, they were also highly corruptible, as were soldiers and sailors deputized into service as customs agents. Enforcement of metropolitan trade regulations and monopolies was mostly dependent on local officials. Effective enforcement, therefore, was difficult to accomplish, as the existence of such trade acts generated a steady stream of bribes to these very officials. Moreover, local economies truly depended on the commercial services provided, on the cheap, by illegal traders. Thus public officials and customs agents were routinely persuaded—through friendship, partnership, bribery, or intimidation—into colluding with smugglers.31 During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the failure of the customs service to curb illegal trade among American merchants, especially contraband trade in French ports in Canada and the West Indies (in violation

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of the British embargo), moved Parliament to authorize naval officers to act as customs officers and apprehend smugglers. The Crown also issued privateering commissions, authorizing commerce raiding against smugglers; between 1760 and 1763, English privateers captured roughly two hundred smuggling vessels from Salem, Massachusetts, alone.32 Measures taken after the war to improve the enforcement of Britain’s protectionist Navigation Acts made these wartime policies permanent. These postwar measures also reflected an appreciation on the part of the British state that corruption in the enforcement agencies—customs officers, naval officers, and privateers—was endemic. When examining the customs service’s failure in American waters during the course of the war, the Board of Trade insisted that a solution had to include an expansion of the customs service and its mandate. Thus in March 1763, Parliament authorized naval officers and customs officers to seize small ships found “loitering”—that is, not on their way to or from any particular port—within two leagues (roughly six miles) of the coast. Moreover, such vessels (ships of less than fifty tons, which were often used as smuggling vessels) were prohibited from importing into colonial ports merchandise that offered high profits for smugglers, such as liquor, tobacco, and tea.33 At the same time, Parliament attempted to change administrative structures and procedures to combat corruption and collusion with smugglers. Whereas in previous decades American merchants and smugglers were easily able to dissuade customs agents from enforcing the Navigation Acts (by paying them off, pressuring them through influential connections, or retaliating against them with civil suits in colonial courts presided over by friendly judges and partisan juries), British navigation acts put in place after the war, such as the Revenue Act of 1762 and the Sugar Act of 1764, established tighter Parliamentary supervision over customs agents. They stipulated harsher penalties for corruption and prohibited the appointment of officers in ports near their places of birth or recent places of residence, while also providing measures to shield agents (and deputized naval officers) from political pressure and judicial retaliation.34 As mentioned earlier, wartime legislation already authorized the customs service to deputize naval officers. Following the war, however, Parliament offered naval officers an added incentive to remain active on this

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front: whereas customs officers kept only one-third of captured prizes (giving the rest to the Crown, the local provincial governor, and the adjudicating Vice Admiralty court), naval officers were allowed to divide their prizes with the Crown equally—fifty/fifty. The Royal Navy, it was hoped, would be less susceptible to corruption and intimidation than local officeholders at port. Immediately following this legislation, in the spring of 1764, the Admiralty—rather than the customs service—began initiating deputations of naval officers as customs agents.35 Attracted to the privateering business model (minus the financial risk), junior and senior officers were quick to cash in on the financial opportunities offered by Parliament. As demonstrated in chapter 2, privateering commissions were often useful documents in case of capture, but they also allowed captains to sell in the open goods that were captured or stolen on the high seas. Rather than going through the trouble, risk, and expense of smuggling, a commission allowed merchants to bring pirated goods to market with the cover of legitimacy.36 Privateers holding commissions from the customs service in the 1810s were known to engage in piracy and smuggling in the English Channel. A few were tried and convicted, but not enough to deter others from these practices.37 Naval officers responded similarly to these same opportunities. Like privateers, they took to commandeering contraband and selling it—either legally or on the black market, as smugglers—thereby driving their profit margin even higher than civilian smugglers.38 Indeed, it was reported that Rhode Island sugar merchants regarded naval vessels as piratical at this point.39 British imperial administrators recognized that smuggling was endemic in coastal communities in Britain and the New World, that it was conducted virtually in the open, and that it was facilitated by a cooperative citizenry, magistracy, and constabulary. Those smugglers who had the misfortune of being caught in the enforcement sieve were routinely released by magistrates, customs officers, or juries, even in the face of damning evidence.40 If the increasingly severe rhetorical, legislative, and judicial measures against illegal trade were not effective in deterring smugglers and their confederates from their trade, these endeavors reflected both the growing frustration of the government with the open lawlessness in the country and the desperate financial needs of the Treasury.

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The Treasury’s determined commitment to combat and diminish this rampant tax evasion was driven by Britain’s mounting national debt during the long eighteenth century. The English Treasury had engaged in short-term borrowing in times of war from the 1650s on, but in 1689— the starting point to 126 years of near-constant war for England—the government committed itself to long-term borrowing (that is, to a permanent national debt). The financial pressure of funding increasingly large armies and navies in successive and long, drawn-out wars, while also managing the national debt (that is, paying the interest—£2 million a year at the start of the eighteenth century, £10 million a year toward the end of the century) led the government to increase the tax burden. It did so quite effectively and consistently. Before 1689, England’s average annual tax revenue amounted to roughly £2 million. During the War of the Grand Alliance, in the 1690s, the average tax revenue increased to £3.6 million per year, climbing to £6.4 million in the 1740s, £12 million in the 1770s, £19 million in the early 1790s, £31 million in 1801, £55 million in 1806, and £79 million at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.41 This dramatic growth in tax revenues came mostly from the imposition of new taxes and from elevating existing rates of taxation, rather than from economic expansion.42 The greatest contributor to this wealth in revenue was the excise tax, but the government’s income from customs duties grew consistently during the long eighteenth century, from £1.5 million in 1700 to £4.5 million at the end of the American War, to £14 million at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.43 New and increasingly high excise and customs duties placed considerable financial pressure on consumers, especially during wartime, when prices of commodities and labor rose as a result of supply shortages and increased demand. It was this burden that explains the explosive growth of smuggling, the immense market for cheap contraband, and the public pressure on the British government—as these eighteenth-century wars wore on—to end hostilities. Freebooters and smugglers were vital to the viability of household economies and the vitality of local economies throughout the British world. When examining the failure of the campaigns to suppress smuggling and piracy, one must also keep in mind that, even on land, Britain’s central government in the early modern era had a difficult time exerting its will and authority, enforcing the law, providing security on roads and

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city streets, collecting taxes, and, above all, convincing its subjects of the legitimacy of such efforts at centralized governance. This was doubly true at sea and at the water’s edge, where the government’s reach exceeded its grasp and where its jurisdiction was highly contested, and mostly ignored. Addressing these deficits in legitimacy and public support, the British government attempted to complement its law enforcement efforts against smugglers with a public relations campaign. The consistent use of the term “fair trader” to distinguish legal from illegal traders and to delegitimize the latter, met with a public relations rebuttal, as smugglers and their partners and supporters came to refer to themselves as “free traders.”44 The government hoped to shame lawbreakers into compliance by publicizing the names of known smugglers in the London Gazette; moreover, it aimed to encourage informers and bounty hunters by placing a price on the heads of these notorious smugglers. But given the muscle and soft influence of smugglers in their communities, and with public sentiment and public interest squarely behind “free traders,” such endeavors were not, on the whole, successful.45 Moving from the ranks of the “free traders” to join the smaller cadre of “fair traders” was certainly a public act, advertised locally in London and signaled to the authorities in a variety of other ways (for example, naming one’s ship Fair Trader).46 While free traders cultivated relations with local government officials, fair traders declared themselves to be friends of the central government and depended on strong enforcement of the law to remain solvent (that is, not to be priced out of the market). Just as marine insurance underwriters became public advocates—through local publications, lobbying, and other public acts—of strong enforcement of convoy and anti-piracy laws, so too did fair traders with regard to trade laws, monopolies, and customs enforcement.47 Editorials written in support of fair trade explained to readers that in the long run the interest of the consumer was, in fact, the same as that of the fair trader. A letter to the editor of the Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, for example, argued in 1755 that “The little, mean, sordid, pitiful Arts that have been us’d by Merchants and Tradesmen, have not only hurt the fair Trader, but damag’d the Trade in general, and discredited the Nation. In a Word, Honesty is the best Policy, and I recommend it to all Dealers in Wool, and am determin’d to practice it myself.”48

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Smugglers and local officials found their association mutually beneficial, as did fair traders and the central government. Commercial giants like the East India Company or the Levant Company had a reciprocal relationship with Parliament (receiving legislated trading monopolies, timely naval and military support, convoy escorts, financial rescues, and loans, while paying the Treasury huge sums in customs duties). It was doubtless easier to collect customs on large accounts than on numerous smaller ones.49 Moreover, because fair traders such as the East India Company were granted royal monopolies in certain markets and commodities, they faced relatively limited competition from bargain-basement price-cutters, which allowed them to pay import taxes and pass the cost on to consumers. Small, independent shippers were engaged in fierce price wars with other merchants and stood to gain fewer benefits from fair trading—they were not as well positioned to receive government loans and financial rescues if they neared bankruptcy, to benefit from naval escorts, or to receive trade monopolies. Such merchants, then, faced few drawbacks from continuing as free traders and not entering into a reciprocal relationship with central authorities. Becoming a fair trader was a way for upwardly mobile merchants and trading houses to shift their focus from local markets and local officials to imperial markets and imperial authorities—to move up, or aim to move up, to a higher class of commercial players and toward a more symbiotic relationship with the central government and its organs (such as the Board of Trade, the Treasury, and the Admiralty). The fact that so many merchants remained focused, as free traders, on cultivating relations with peripheral markets and officials is itself an indication of how oriented British communities were toward local custom, concerns, allegiances, social obligations, and politics, rather than national ones. Like piracy, smuggling represented an ethical, ideological, and jurisdictional challenge to state authority. First, the flourishing of illegal trade denied revenues to national treasuries. Just as important, however, the persistence and expanding scope of smuggling in the face of a spirited law enforcement and public relations campaign to suppress and delegitimize it exposed the impotence of central governments to shape commercial behavior on the local level. Naturally, this encouraged greater disregard on the part of local administrators and subjects—in Britain and in its colonial possessions—for new legislation and regulations flowing from London. This disjunction between national policy initiatives and local

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practice, between national jurisdiction and localities’ self-determination, validated the standing of the common law, while continuously undermining the endeavors of the central government to use the civil law as a tool of local administration. These dynamics shaped public attitudes toward smuggling and commerce raiding alike, as ancient and respectable trades under attack through the novelties of bureaucratic centralization and the civil law. The British government’s law enforcement efforts at sea, at port, and in court against pirates and smugglers, the laws enacted to suppress these trades, the rhetoric that characterized them, and the conception of law and of state that informed them simply did not conform to the legal beliefs and political philosophy of British society. Britons not in the immediate orbit of the central government and its bureaucracy—farmers, manufacturers, laborers, merchants, consumers, and even local government officials— exhibited more archaic attitudes concerning trade and state authority, attitudes anchored in local custom and common law.50 Smugglers were not members of a criminal underclass in their communities. The scope and volume of illegal trade grew as the central authorities’ anti-smuggling campaign intensified, and as tariffs were expanded and elevated, because smuggling involved broad swaths of British society. Laborers, peddlers, retailers, respectable merchants, and local officeholders and gentry knowingly participated in this trade and considered customs evasion to be legitimate, conventional, and traditional commercial conduct, rather than a crime.51 Indeed, it was common for well-respected merchants who carried legal imports—including ship captains of the British East India Company—to also carry private shipments of tea, silks, or other imports to be sold on the black market, in violation of legal restrictions and without going through customs.52 As was the case with piracy, privateering, and long-distance trade, the ethical line between legal and illegal trade was not clear-cut in the minds of subjects and citizens who possessed a premodern understanding of commerce, of law, and of state authority and jurisdiction. Fisher Ames expressed this assessment in a 1789 address to Congress: “The habit of smuggling pervades our country. We were taught it when it was considered rather as meritorious than criminal.”53 This was not a subversive assessment. Customs duties and the Navigation Acts made conventional trading practices illicit, while ineffective enforcement and high tariffs created strong incentives for merchants and

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consumers to adhere to these accepted practices. Adam Smith, a customs officer himself, explains in The Wealth of Nations that smugglers were honest traders, made criminals by novel laws that upended accepted and just mores: by serving the public, “the smuggler is often encouraged to continue a trade which he is thus taught to consider as in some measure innocent; and when the severity of the revenue laws is ready to fall upon him he is frequently disposed to defend with violence, what he has been accustomed to regard as his just property.”54 Attempts at enforcement indeed unleashed violent and highly effective resistance on the part of smugglers and their many accomplices. Smuggling vessels, already armed for encounters at sea, evaded or forcefully resisted arrest by naval or customs vessels on their way to friendly shores. On the shorelines and in ports, numerous and bloody clashes took place between gangs of smugglers and revenue men; between 1723 and 1730, 250 customs officers were injured and at least six were killed in such clashes in England. In May 1733, the customs collector of Inverness informed the Scottish Board of Customs that a number of “ill disposed villains have carried away the Custom House boat across the ferry, and with saws and axes have cut her in two in the middle, left the one half on the beach, and disposed of the other to the waves.” Moreover, locals had broken into the customs warehouse twice, destroying official documents and mutilating a suspected informer by cutting off his ears. Similarly, a band of English customs officers reported an attack by local smugglers with mastiffs and whips; the attackers disarmed the officers, clubbed them with their own pistols, and warned that if they left the customs house again, they would not return to it alive.55 Smuggling gangs—some numbering in the hundreds—controlled the import trade along British coasts. They practiced their trade in the open, subjecting customs agents and informants to physical, at times fatal, violence.56 The running confrontations between smugglers and customs authorities in the south of England in the eighteenth century has been described as a guerrilla war, complete with battles and sieges. In a 1744 report to the Treasury Department, a customs officer referred to the English coast as “a frontier town in a state of war.” Moreover, such violence and intimidation were directed not only toward field agents—those most exposed to the general public on the local level—but also toward senior bureaucrats in the customs service.57

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Despite anti-smuggling legislation that became increasingly assertive and punitive (and which expanded the legal definition of smuggling), and despite the creation of the Preventive Service, coastal blockade, and Coastguard, customs enforcement efforts remained inadequate to the task. The result was that the early nineteenth century saw a continuation of the widespread, large-scale, and violent smuggling that had characterized the eighteenth century.58 Central governments remained powerless to legislatively alter local practices of maritime trade in the North Atlantic fisheries as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Those administrators charged with the task of enforcing metropolitan policies echoed the frustrated complaints of their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, castigating locals for conspiring en masse with smugglers and interlopers against the authorities.59 Resistance to taxation and trade restrictions was not merely a constant, timeless feature of English life. Rather, this level of animus and resistance, as well as its ideological underpinnings, were the products of an era that saw a meteoric increase in the scale of taxation, following centuries of relative stability. The long eighteenth century began with significant changes in the nature, as well as the scope, of taxation, and the establishment of a permanent national debt. Indeed, while Britain’s overall GNP grew roughly threefold over this period, tax receipts increased fifteen-fold. It was the transformation of the English state into a “fiscal-military state” or “tax state” that explains the transformed nature, scope, and intensity of resistance to state authority.60 The general and widespread consensus that the tax system and the political infrastructure that created and sustained it were unfair or predatory cast the state as a conspiracy in the popular imagination.61 It was this conception of state and of law that accounted for the growing willingness of Britons to help others evade the law. Smugglers, like pirates, were considered outlaws in certain circles, but not others. They were commercial actors operating within a legal and cultural framework that legitimized their conduct. As demonstrated in this chapter, it was not only smugglers and accomplices who believed themselves justified in their commercial behavior. Rather, the sense that smugglers were free traders who deserved praise, rather than indictment, was shared by many Britons in all levels of society and administration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.62 As the political economist

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John Bowring observed in 1832, “The smuggler is in reality a public benefactor. . . . The smuggler who smuggles against a duty of 30 per cent. has 30 per cent. value in the love and affection of the inhabitants; if against 60 per cent., he has much more; if against prohibition, he has the greatest portion of friendly regard that can be shown him.”63 Smuggling and dealing in contraband brought cheap goods to market and denied the central government revenues, but—just as important—they also denied the state’s claim to exert control over its borders, its shores and, in Britain’s case, the oceans as well. Border and shoreline communities in Britain and North America shared a strong belief that smuggling was an essential, natural, and legitimate component of their local economies. Thus as state authorities attempted to curb unregulated free trade, local constituents increasingly came to regard the central government as an unwelcome and alien force.64 Such attitudes toward the national government by upstanding and respectable constituents, especially in times of war, seem, to modern readers, inconsistent with the patriotic sentiment otherwise exhibited by Britons and Americans during the long eighteenth century. This supposed clash between patriotic allegiance and unfettered, unregulated commerce is best exemplified in the wartime contraband trade. But just as early modern merchants and consumers viewed trade with pirates—the declared enemies of their sovereigns—to be legitimate and respectable rather than subversive, so did they view trading in enemy ports in times of war. Commerce with friend and foe alike was seen as having no bearing on one’s loyalty and commitment to one’s countrymen.65 New World merchants were known to facilitate such trade during the Seven Years’ War by engaging in collusive prize captures when trading in enemy ports. They would hire a commissioned privateer to capture a commercial vessel or convoy on its way from an enemy port, so as to deny naval captains and privateers the opportunity of capturing and making prizes of their contraband cargoes. Once they reached an English port, the merchant vessels would bid farewell to their for-hire captors and head to market. Another way that merchants found to travel safely to and from enemy ports in wartime for the purpose of trade was to purchase flag-oftruce commissions, commonly for exchanges of prisoners of war. While conducting their commissioned duties in enemy ports, however, such vessels also traded with local merchants. This trade became so popular

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and profitable that merchants would bid against one another for prisoners to carry to French ports. In one case, American merchants hired French speakers to impersonate prisoners of war. As payment, these impersonators received a salary and the right to carry contraband sugar onboard to sell at their home port. In the final year of the Seven Years’ War, the Royal Navy took over prisoner-transport duties in an effort to put an end to this form of illegal trade.66 Trade with the enemy, in violation of imposed embargoes and blockades, was both common and extensive in Britain and its American and Caribbean colonies during the many wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both in the Atlantic and across the English Channel. To the consternation of the Privy Council and Board of Trade, merchants did not feel the need to go to great lengths to hide their role in this trade from their associates—they took out insurance policies on contraband cargoes, insurance underwriters insured enemy ships, and bankers and financiers participated in the funding of voyages to enemy ports. Indeed, marine insurance underwriters calculated the risk posed to these illegal cargoes from British naval and customs authorities when setting premiums. Naturally, trading with enemies (and with pirates) was as commonplace in French, Dutch, and Spanish port towns.67 In the United States, this commercial culture persisted after independence, with American and Canadian merchants trading extensively during President Jefferson’s ill-fated embargo. This practice continued and flourished during the War of 1812, when American merchants sold provisions to Canadian merchants and British forces, including the Royal Navy while it was engaged in a blockade of American coastlines.68 No stigma was attached to illicit trade in either wartime or peace; smuggling and trade with the enemy were carried out not by fringe criminal outfits, but by prominent families and established financiers, merchants, and trading firms.69 The massive levels of wartime contraband trade reveal an early modern commercial mentality—commerce with rivals and enemies was conventional; the Navigation Acts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, in fact, attempts to curtail this freewheeling trade with diplomatic and commercial rivals.70 Just as important, the scope of this trade also reveals an early modern political mentality. Freebooters and free-traders—including those smugglers engaged in trade with the enemy in wartime—saw themselves as law-abiding and patriotic

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subjects and citizens. Rather than elevating private interest above the public good, they were seen as providing local communities with cheap goods and lucrative markets for their produce and manufactures.71 Trade with the enemy, commerce with pirates, and smuggling were not products of a deficit of loyalism and patriotic sentiment, but indicative of a conventionally localist political point of view and a generations-old conception of limited state jurisdiction in local matters, and especially with regard to commerce at sea.72 The state of the law, even as late as the 1760s, indicates just how novel—how unanchored in law or custom—was the notion that national governments had the authority and the jurisdiction to prohibit maritime trade with a given partner, even in times of war. During the Seven Years’ War, when a ship was seized for trading with the enemy, the ship and the cargo would go on trial, rather than the crew, the captain, or the proprietors. The ship and cargo faced the prospect of becoming a legal prize, but the offending captain and owner did not face criminal prosecution. Trafficking with the enemy in times of war was, by law, a run-of-the-mill violation of the trade laws, rather than an act of treason.73 In the recurring wars between England and France historians see the buds of a nascent national consciousness, sentiment, and enmity. Yet in many coastal communities—especially along the English Channel—evidence of Anglo-French enmity was counterbalanced by AngloFrench commercial cooperation. English merchants, fishermen, smugglers, retailers, and consumers routinely and enthusiastically cooperated and dealt with their French counterparts, trading not only in commercial goods but also in intelligence, munitions, and military contraband (for example, Irish troops smuggled from Britain to France during the War of Austrian Succession).74 It is no surprise, therefore, that smuggling was associated—by the authorities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and by modern historians—with political and ideological opposition to Parliamentary and royal authority, specifically Jacobite opposition. Smugglers were seen, at least potentially, as dissidents and subversives aiming to deny the Treasury vital customs income, rather than merchants motivated by mere greed.75 Jacobites did express support for smuggling as a form of “Country” critique of a Parliament that had exceeded its traditional jurisdictional boundaries through usurpation, centralization, and corruption. They

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condemned the customs service, the Excise Department, and the army as tools of governmental encroachment—customs houses represented state authority in the same way that courthouses, police stations, and army bases do today.76 The novelty of new forms of taxation—especially excise and customs—generated resistance and resentful claims of usurpation and illegitimacy. This fit seamlessly with similar charges leveled against William III following his military takeover and various bureaucratic and administrative reforms. In this respect, the conventional, mundane commercial activities of “free traders” were cloaked with a supportive conservative political philosophy.77 These smugglers were not criminals engaged in what they perceived to be a crime; for many, smuggling was ordinary trade and—at least in part—a manifestation of a political philosophy that challenged the novel expansion of Parliamentary jurisdiction after 1688. The Hanoverian Succession (1714) cemented this association between Jacobitism and smuggling in the minds of Jacobites and Whigs alike. Jacobite sentiments spread quickly in Britain after 1714, drawing on local communities’ hostility to intrusive outside forces like the new German king and his Whig ministry.78 A storyline of heavy, unfair, and predatory taxation, unaccountable government, electoral manipulation, and corruption in high places had already established itself by the time George I took over the machinery of state. George I’s reign, and that of Robert Walpole, lent credence to this perception and to the suspicion that the state and the civil law were a conspiracy. In this context, smuggling was more than a criminal activity. It became associated—both by Whig authorities and by Jacobite sympathizers at the time and by modern historians—with a genuine resistance movement against the effects of the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Settlement. Referring to smuggling as “free trade” indicates that while smugglers were engaged in a for-profit commercial activity, they also saw themselves as participating in an ideological and principled challenge to the jurisdictional presumptions of the state to tax and regulate trade.79 The same principled dispute between the central government and the localities over trade manifested itself in Britain’s New World colonies, but without the ideological framework of Jacobitism. Colonial polities and populations in the eighteenth century reflected traditional, backwardlooking notions regarding the structure of the British state and empire, with respect to both unfettered trade and the “proper” balance between

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center and periphery (that is, the limited reach of the central government into local administration). These commercial and political philosophies were built into the de facto policy, or mindset, of salutary neglect. Even the Board of Trade, which pursued imperial regulation of colonial trade and reflected metropolitan ideas and concerns, hesitated to recommend imperial intervention in colonies’ domestic affairs.80 The Board of Trade itself, then, acknowledged that British colonists held on to notions of a decentralized imperial state, one that deferred to local custom and common law. Local governmental bureaucracies in Britain and its New World colonies, combined with the heritage of unfettered trade, retarded the enforcement of mercantilist policies enacted by Parliament or put in place, in the form of regulation, by the ministry and Board of Trade. The central government’s attempts to delegitimize and outlaw certain commercial practices—such as commerce raiding, smuggling, and trade with the enemy—engendered resistance in local communities and sparked an ideological contest between central authorities and local populations over the jurisdictional limits of the central government and of the civil law. Although this resistance became associated with Jacobite opposition in Britain and Patriot opposition in British America, it predated the latter and persisted well past the dissolution of the former.81 Jacobite smuggling at the height of the Jacobite threat and American smuggling during the Revolutionary era were consistent with traditional English trade practices; moreover, the Jacobite and Patriot challenges to Parliamentary authority and supremacy were consistent with traditional English localism and with common-law protections.82 Illegal trade merely represented a commercial and political culture at odds with the nature and scope of the state envisioned by Parliamentary and royal authorities. Taken in this context, the famous Liberty and Gaspee affairs (violent attacks by American colonists on customs officers on the eve of the American Revolution) could be regarded not as a symptom of American separatism or defiance against British rule, but of quite conventional British attitudes toward the customs service. Customs agents (including soldiers and sailors placed under the command of the customs service) faced obstruction and violent treatment at the hand of British communities on a regular basis on both sides of the Atlantic. Throughout the early modern era, smugglers (both foreign and domestic) were considered to be public

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benefactors and honest merchants, rather than criminals. Local crowds prevented their arrest, and juries acquitted the few who were indicted. Communities forcefully “liberated” confiscated contraband cargoes from customs houses and intimidated customs agents and local officials—including justices, militia officers, royal agents, and colonial governors and legislators—from enforcing the law. While smugglers were regarded by neighbors, consumers, retailers, and the local gentry, magistracy, and clergy as servants of the public good, customs enforcers were seen as outsiders whose efforts conflicted with the interests of the community.83 Juries did more than merely acquit indicted smugglers; they were used as a tool to punish and intimidate customs agents who proved to be too diligent in executing their office. The Board of Customs reported to Parliament that it had become common practice by the early eighteenth century to load onto smuggling vessels goods on which customs had been paid and to lure customs officers into seizing them. The customs officers would then be sued for damages, relying on local juries—“being generally people concerned in smuggling”—to find for the plaintiffs. The board petitioned Parliament to combat this practice by allowing a change of venue for such trials.84 Juries were known to be particularly harsh toward customs officers who injured or killed suspected smugglers. This, of course, had a chilling effect on customs officers while pursuing smugglers, and eventually led—in the latter part of the eighteenth century—to the authorization of a change of venue (to London) for trials in which customs officers stood accused.85 The post of customs officer was a thankless job, involving an unattractive combination of low wages, social isolation, and high risk of violence and prosecution. While customs authorities and the courts did have intermittent success in capturing contraband cargoes and convicting smugglers, they were surrounded by a sea of contraband and systemic customs evasion. Statistically, smugglers conducted their business freely and unimpeded, thanks to the ignorance, impotence, acquiescence, complicity, or venality of British enforcement agencies. Community values, peer pressure, threats of violence, threats of prosecution, economic pressures, and bribery had the power to “convert” anti-smuggling customs officers, justices, and local officeholders in British and American ports, discouraging them from closely examining the documents and bills of sale of incoming goods.86

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This was especially true in ports other than London. Scottish and Irish ports, even more than English ones, were known for hostility toward the customs service. Ireland, in particular, operated as a de facto freetrade zone; as Neville Williams observes, “A more carefree band of men than the Irish Customs officials was not to be found in the whole of Europe.”87 Indeed, stark violence toward customs agents was not as evident in Ireland and North America as it was in England, since enforcement efforts there were much weaker than along the coastlines of the south of England. To a considerable degree, the rapid development during the eighteenth century of major port cities in North America and western Britain—such as Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow—was a product of the thriving smuggling industry in these ports and the security that these communities offered smugglers and their accomplices.88 Smuggling should be understood as a social crime, shaped by concepts of community and public good, and enjoying broad popular support. It is easy to understand why smuggling was regarded as beneficial to local consumers and local economies: not only did it reaffirm and reenact local customs and beliefs about commerce, law, and state, but smugglers also brought cheap goods to shore, while providing local farmers and manufacturers with markets that were otherwise restricted by naval embargo, trade acts, or commercial monopolies. The public supported illegal trade not just because of political attitudes toward state authority, local jurisdiction, common law, and commerce, but also because the vast majority of British subjects drank, smoked, wore, and otherwise utilized contraband goods. Many also made their living off it, as scouts, guards, transporters, storage providers, silversmiths, fences, retailers, collaborators, and the like.89 This vast black market provided pirates and smugglers with handsome profits and widespread social, administrative, and political support. Indeed, central authorities and “fair traders” attempted, on the public relations front, to explain to consumers, retailers, and merchants how their local economies suffered when the national treasury was deprived of customs income.90 The failure of this public relations campaign went hand in hand with the failure of the government’s enforcement efforts. Smugglers’ disregard for the law and violent treatment of customs agents were well publicized through gossip, local newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, which pro-

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vided written and pictorial accounts of their misdeeds. Because the authorities’ impotence was widely manifest, the rhetoric of Parliament and the courts rang hollow and the public’s support for, and involvement in, smuggling increased in the face of these governmental campaigns. Customs agents were ineffective also because they—like other officeholders on the local level—were members of the social and professional circle of influential smugglers; in some cases, they themselves were directly involved in smuggling.91 Customs enforcement at port and at sea was not only porous and ineffective but also counterproductive. With smuggling on the rise following the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy and the customs service beefed up deployment and enforcement along England’s southern coast. This effort came at a cost, but it was expected that the investment would pay for itself through the sale of seized cargoes and through increased future revenues from customs duties. Stricter, more effective enforcement, it was hoped, would intimidate and convince merchants to pay import taxes, rather than risk capture. These expectations did not pan out—customs compliance (and revenues) did not increase and seizures did not yield enough to cover the cost of enforcement. In 1819, for example, the cost of coastal enforcement came to £546,402, while the Crown’s share of seizures amounted to only £15,640.92 Similarly, an 1825 report to Parliament listed the customable goods seized between 1822 and 1825 by Britain’s various enforcement agencies. While these cargoes were sold by the state for £282,541, the report pointed out that the cost of making the seizures amounted to over £2 million.93 The Treasury, then, actually lost £1.7 million (in the span of three years) on the smuggled cargoes that the government did manage to seize, which represented a small fraction of all goods smuggled into Britain overall. These numbers confirm that the Treasury lost more money by trying to enforce customs duties than by allowing customs evasion. These reported losses, combined with Britain’s extraordinary national debt, might explain policy makers’ willingness, in the 1840s, to change course and attempt novel customs policies. In 1885, W. D. Chester, himself a customs officer, wrote—in concurrence with the assessment of the Commissioners of Customs—that the most effective measure adopted against the smugglers and in the suppression of their industry was the severe reduction, or abolition, of customs

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duties on imports, as part of a British free-trade policy.94 This view is shared by modern economic historians and scholars of smuggling and trade, as well as by contemporaries in the late nineteenth century (officials on the Board of Customs and lay observers alike). As John Banks’s nineteenth-century account of illicit trade has it, “The lowering of the import duties in this country since 1830 has done more to prevent smuggling than all the Custom-house officers, Coast-blockades, Preventivemen, and Coast-guard put together.”95 The reduction of tariffs was a product of the obvious failure of efforts to enforce the law, but also of active lobbying on the part of fair traders, who petitioned Parliament for a drastic reduction of tariffs as the sole remedy for the rampant smuggling, and the only policy that would allow fair traders to remain competitive in the market.96 This remedy had already been tested, successfully, well before the mid-nineteenth century. The tax reform of 1745 reduced customs duties on tea by 75 percent. The reduction was specifically designed to address the decline of legal trade in tea due to the immense profitability of smuggling and the notoriously weak customs enforcement.97 This drastic cut leveled the playing field and allowed fair traders to compete with free traders, who themselves incurred various added costs associated with smuggling, such as bribes and other payments to officials, scouts, guards, fences, and the like. Tariffs were raised thereafter to provide revenues for a Treasury drowning in war debts, but the Commutation Act of 1784 again drastically reduced import taxes on tea (from 119 to 12.5 percent). The result was a tripling of legal tea importation over the next two years, while the volume of smuggled tea declined dramatically; this effectively secured the British East India Company’s monopoly in the tea trade (which was one of the primary goals of this legislation). This trend was again reversed during the costly wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, when customs duties on tea spiked, as did the illegal trade in that market.98 The near-continuous global wars of the long eighteenth century created an expansive and immensely lucrative market for pirates and smugglers—large-scale campaigning on land and sea, commercial embargoes, and wartime economies drove commodity prices upward, while wartime national deficits led to higher and higher tariff walls.99 The long peace that followed in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars created military, economic, and political conditions that undercut the profitability of smug-

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gling and, by extension, piracy as well. Within a generation, customs duties were reduced—first gradually, then drastically—and in most cases eliminated altogether, with the repeal of the Corn Laws and Navigation Acts in 1849.100 Like the government’s anti-piracy efforts, the long, costly and violent harsh-justice campaign against smugglers had failed to produce the desired results. Meanwhile, the transition to fair trading in the mid-nineteenth century, in the context of a free-trade tax policy, was rapid and peaceful. Naturally, smuggling diminished and disappeared only in dutyfree goods.101 Those commodities that were still subject to customs—tobacco and spirits, for example—continued to be smuggled into Britain, although reduced taxation on these imports cut into smugglers’ profit margins and altered their risk assessment. Free traders incurred costs that fair traders could avoid—reduced size of cargoes (to allow for quick delivery and customs evasion), paying for armed protection and scouts, bribes for officials, and losses due to seizure or prosecution. High taxation rates had made all these costs and risks financially worthwhile; severe reductions of the tariff made them much less so.

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Conclusion

The oceans, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out, were wild frontiers “reaching round the globe,” only minimally pacified, regulated, and civilized by governments on land. The activities—and the actors—of maritime trade were, for the most part, beyond the practical reach of central governments and, according to many in Britain and North America, beyond their legal jurisdiction as well. Despite efforts by state authorities to eradicate piracy, armed commerce at sea continued throughout the long eighteenth century, long past its alleged demise in the 1720s. Freebooting was seen as an honest, legitimate, and conventional trade; indeed, it was understood to be a normal feature of maritime trade. Legalistic distinctions between privateering and piracy were not discernible in practice, nor widely accepted as legally binding or morally meaningful in seafaring communities and by local authorities. Since privateers functioned—according to all contemporary and modern accounts—as pirates, the distinction between piracy and privateering should be set aside as an irrelevance. Contemporaries in the Atlantic World, both proponents and opponents of freebooting, did not see in the early eighteenth century a transition to an age of privateering, but simply a continuation of the golden age of piracy of the seventeenth century. In this context, the stability in marine insurance rates during the eighteenth century hardly requires explanation. A continuation of normal trade conditions in the Atlantic explains the continuation of normal risk assessment and insurance rates. Constant warfare, wartime economies, high tariffs, and the protection 92

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offered to merchants by marine insurance created the economic conditions for a flourishing market in pirated goods and various other forms of illegal trade. Illegal trade—commerce raiding, violations of trade laws and monopolies, trade with the enemy, and smuggling—boosted local economies in Britain and North America and enjoyed wide public support; while designated as illegal by Parliament, and accepted as such by modern observers, it was considered legal, legitimate, traditional, and beneficial by most contemporaries. In fact, it was the efforts of central governments to suppress illegal trade and shape commercial practices, especially beyond the shoreline, that were considered novel, unconstitutional, illegitimate, and detrimental to the public good. Such endeavors by the central government were actively resisted and effectively undermined and negated by local authorities and large segments of British society on both sides of the Atlantic. Just as war and tariffs generated high profits for pirates and smugglers, the long peace that followed the Napoleonic Wars deflated gains from smuggling and, by extension, piracy as well. The dramatic reduction and eventual elimination of most tariffs in Britain by the mid-nineteenth century further deflated the profitability of illegal trade in the Atlantic. Starting in the eighteenth century, Euro-American pirates expanded their operations to the Pacific and Indian Oceans as Atlantic cargoes declined in value (sugar, fish, and other consumer goods increasingly replaced the gold and silver cargoes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and more lucrative targets presented themselves along newly established trade routes in the South Sea and beyond the horn of Africa. This regional shift was not a product of effective law enforcement in the Atlantic, but of the riches available to successful merchants and freebooters beyond the Atlantic. Atlantic commerce raiding became less profitable in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries not only in comparison to raiding elsewhere in the world, however, but also in comparison to peaceful trade in the Atlantic itself, as long-term shifts in the maritime economy reduced incentives for maritime predation.1 The eighteenth century saw a decline in the relative size of Britain’s privateering fleet, from 41 percent of all British merchant vessels during the War of the Spanish Succession to just 18 and 9 percent, respectively, during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.2 This decline took place notwithstanding strong

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encouragement from the British government and despite weak anti-privateering efforts by French, Spanish, and American navies. What drew British merchants from armed commerce to peaceful trade was the prospect of higher profit margins, as new markets opened up in the Americas and as more effective convoy protection increased the chances of bringing lucrative goods to market.3 Thus the scope of Atlantic piracy diminished quietly in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars, rather than through a violent campaign of confrontation and suppression by state authorities. By the midcentury mark, piracy in the Atlantic was sufficiently curtailed, giving insurance underwriters little cause to consider factors other than “ordinary perils of the sea” in the assessment of premiums.4 The accepted storyline on the rise, decline, and fall of Atlantic piracy is a tale of civilization taming a wild frontier. The nationalist narrative of creeping civilization, imposed by marshals, armed forces, courts, and gallows, was a meaningful one to Britons and Americans in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it did not necessarily describe the western frontiers—Atlantic, American, and Canadian—accurately. Frontiers on land and sea were useful to energized national governments in their efforts to articulate and uphold the differences between legitimate and illegitimate authority and force. It was during this period that both Britain and the United States discontinued the practice of commissioning privateers, drawing a sharp moral distinction between the violence employed by government forces at sea and that applied by private vessels and the rogue governments that commissioned or sponsored them. The understanding of frontiers as theaters in which national agencies (such as the courts, armed forces, and other enforcement entities) forcefully compelled or otherwise brought about local compliance with national standards reflected and reinforced the narrative arc of national governments’ public relations campaigns from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This assessment of borderlands has been challenged since the 1990s and, increasingly, replaced with a recognition that frontier conditions were persistent and sustainable, and that national authorities, more often than not, acquiesced to local customs, political arrangements, and power brokers. Although the state’s monopoly on violence was articulated in law, it was not accepted as legitimate nor as a practical reality in pe-

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ripheral communities, even as they accepted state sovereignty in other matters. Local inhabitants, officials, gentry, and clergy overwhelmingly supported and protected illegal traders (freebooters, wreckers, free-traders, and the like) from capture and punishment. This attitude by peripheral communities should not be understood as a rejection of the central government’s authority, but as an articulation of the proper boundary between national and local government, and between civil and common law. Mostly, such support for illegal trade reflected a deeply rooted belief that maritime commerce was beyond the jurisdiction of landed governments, that local administration and trade were beyond the jurisdiction of the central government, and that activities sanctioned by common custom and common law (such as plundering and “salvaging” cargoes at sea) could not be legitimately declared unlawful by statute.5 Moreover, on a purely practical level, peripheral communities manifested serious doubts about the effectiveness of law enforcement, a deep distrust of the integrity of law enforcement agents, and an enduring suspicion regarding the operations and intentions of central governments.6 Because of this, local constituents—and, in most case, local officials— identified and sided with freebooters and free-traders when these clashed with enforcers of central authority and the civil law, which denounced them as pirates, brigands, and smugglers. Like the social bandits described by E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and Richard White,7 pirates and smugglers were viewed as living embodiments of traditional customs and virtues and of communities’ way of life, all under assault by an unresponsive and increasingly meddlesome state.8 A backward-looking reverence for tradition and communalism triggered a defense and an emotional nostalgia for the political, administrative, and legal arrangements that had for generations enabled and legitimated commerce raiding and other forms of nominally illegal trade. New laws and the courts were unable to change the ethical and legal beliefs of local communities. As Douglas Hay demonstrates in “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” the strict and clear language of the criminal law in eighteenth-century Britain cannot and should not be taken as evidence of its application in practice, nor of popular acquiescence to it, nor indeed of public acceptance of the central government’s presumption to dictate standards of criminality.9

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Conclusion

Piracy trials, and even executions, were not a novelty in the early eighteenth century. Such proceedings had taken place in the English Atlantic during the height of the golden age of piracy in the seventeenth century without diminishing the scope or the legitimacy of the trade. Attitudes toward smuggling, which were intertwined with those regarding freebooting, were as resistant to central governments’ law enforcement and public relations campaigns. The stream of tough legislation, prosecutions, executions, and harsh rhetoric about the heinousness of smuggling did not change public opinion in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries regarding the legitimacy of illegal trade, nor was it effective in deterring smugglers from their trade. The persistence of open violations of the law, with transgressors going unpunished by the authorities and enjoying popularity and support in their communities, was more telling and more representative than the efforts to delegitimize activities such as smuggling, trade with the enemy, piracy, and wrecking. The state’s new and broad claims to jurisdiction were not realized and did not lead to behavior modification during the eighteenth century. The habit of pirates to arm themselves with privateering commissions, for example, was not an eighteenth-century development and should not be construed as indicating a sense that the days of open piracy were over. Pirates had habitually done this during the seventeenth century as well.10 The ease with which one could “legitimize” (in the eyes of the courts) activities that were already legitimate onboard ships, in port towns, and in polite society is what explains the proliferation of privateering commissions; it should not be construed as evidence of merchants buying into the state’s legal discourse. The ease with which commissions could be obtained (even retroactively) suggests a failure of the central government to have its policies carried out by local officials, and indicates an acquiescence of the state to local custom, rather than the reverse. As early modern European states were centralizing their bureaucracies, establishing ideologies of state and law, modernizing their finances, and enacting bureaucratic and commercial monopolies as tools of state building, seas and oceans experienced a different course of development. As national mercantilist economies emerged in Europe, oceans evolved into multinational, trans-imperial trade zones, which operated essentially as free-trade zones, given that state-sponsored monopolies and other legal restrictions were easily and routinely violated and undercut. The vastness

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of these bodies of water challenged legal, bureaucratic, and economic structures put in place by landed governments to facilitate state building. Moreover, the economic and commercial culture of the sea challenged the statist narratives produced by European royal courts, legislatures, and jurists. Smuggling and commerce raiding both represented international networks that clashed with national bureaucracies and with central governments’ attempts to constrain and regulate commercial activity at sea. The nature of early modern maritime trade conflicted with the ideology and the bureaucratic logic of the emerging nation-state. Maritime networks’ commercial activities on the high seas, in coastal waters, and in port towns created an Atlantic culture that contrasted and competed—at least for a time—with the one reflected in imperial law, policy, and rhetoric. The distance between law and practice corresponded to the distance between the seats of government and the myriad loci of Atlantic commercial activities. Governments’ endeavors to bridge this gap between law and practice inevitably involved attempts to bridge the geographical gap as well, by enhancing the presence and role of state agents in local jurisdictions, at sea, and abroad. In this sense, the civil law was a form of propaganda regarding the reach of state authority—a proclamation of national governments’ policy aspirations, as well as their presumptions to jurisdiction and administrative sway in peripheral communities. Britons’ attachment to common law and resistance to both the civil law itself and the novel notions of state jurisdiction and authority that it articulated explain why the transference of piracy cases in 1700 (through a new “Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy”) to newly established Vice-Admiralty courts was so controversial. After all, this juridical innovation drastically expanded the reach of the central government, undermined local governments, clashed with common-law precedents, and established that, unlike other English subjects, accused pirates could be put to death without a jury verdict.11 To modern readers, local governments’ open sponsorship of illegal trade and piracy seems corrupt, if not actually dissident or treasonous. This is because modern standards of bureaucratic administration are woven into the current understanding of law. In the early modern era, such administrative and legal standards were mostly theoretical, reflecting the articulated aspirations of central authorities, rather than contemporary political values of local governments and the general population.

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Conclusion

It is perhaps difficult to simply brush aside the rhetoric of the state in this respect, since modern readers and scholars, as products of the modern nation-state, are particularly receptive to it. Modern societies and bureaucracies are built around a basic and broad consensus that it is the central government’s obligation and purpose to restrict and monopolize violence, and that it is the state’s purpose and right to make certain activities legitimate and others illegitimate. In the eighteenth century, the state’s jurisdiction to do so in local communities was not yet established; it certainly was not established or accepted at sea. The attachment of Britons and Americans to illegal trade, then, did not represent dissidence or an active resistance to the state; rather, the state had yet to make its presence felt in a meaningful way in these coastal and shipboard communities. The state remained a mostly marginal actor in local affairs, especially at the sea’s edge.12 Fundamentally, the legitimacy that the state enjoys in the hearts and minds of modern constituents is borne by knowledge and experience that the state actually has the practical ability and tools to monopolize violence, to disarm nonstate actors, to make certain activities illegal and illegitimate, and to enforce unpopular statutes from border to border, and even at sea. Governments did not enjoy this kind of legitimacy in the eighteenth century because they repeatedly demonstrated to constituents, through their failure to curb piracy and illegal trade, for example, that they did not have the capacity (and, in many cases, the commitment) to enforce the law. Crimes that went unpunished—that were, in fact, rewarded—were not crimes in the public perception.13 As late as the latter half of the nineteenth century, there was still steadfast resistance to the notion that private war-making and commerce raiding were illegitimate, and to the contention that central governments had the authority to outlaw them. In April 1856, the British government signed onto the Treaty of Paris, putting an official end to the Crimean War and issuing a famous joint declaration, by which the signatories agreed to discontinue the use of privateers and allow wartime traffic and trade (except munitions of war) by ships of neutral powers. The Declaration of Paris was meant to delegitimize private violence at sea and, in the process, give a naval advantage to those countries with strong navies, which did not have to resort to privateering to accomplish their war aims. Understandably, Spain and the United States, as well as Mexico, refused

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to sign on to this understanding of principles, defending privateering as a historic, conventional, and legitimate tool of war-making.14 Such vehement consternation and ideological opposition was voiced in Britain as well, however. Many warned, on a practical level, that the Declaration of Paris gave an advantage to Continental—that is, military— powers over naval powers like Britain. As a matter of principle, however, opponents claimed that the Declaration was contrary to the traditional and accepted liberties of Englishmen.15 It is clear, nevertheless, that the national government was winning the war of public opinion. As commerce raiding and illegal trade were virtually eliminated from British waters, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean, the gap between the law and practice in British ports diminished, lending credence to the increasingly authoritative and nationalistic rhetoric of King, Parliament, and other agents of state governance. Adherence to custom and to ancient liberties of local government and of trade became a losing proposition in the late nineteenth century, as these faded in the face of more expansive, centralized, and capable national bureaucracies. Early modern beliefs regarding society, law, and administrative centralization were challenged and undermined by the demographic, political, and ideological forces that shaped capitalist liberal democracies. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the capitalist ethos was a product of these modern legal and administrative structures. Rather, it took shape and developed its ideological and economic-theory justifications, as well as its popular appeal, in the context of a premodern, backward-looking culture that strove to resist the changes associated with the emergence of the modern nation-state.

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Notes

Abbreviations CSP–Col Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies. Ed. Sir John William Fortescue. Vols. 14–16. London: Mackie & Co., 1905–1908. USCSS US Congressional Serial Set. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. http:// memory.loc.gov.

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Introduction 1. In fact, Pompey’s swift success in this campaign was achieved by bribing the pirates with excellent surrender terms, rather than through naval pursuit, confrontation, and combat. De Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World, 168–72, 176, 181–85; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 52–53. 2. Gray, Monday, and Stubblefield, Maritime Terror; Hympendahl, Pirates Aboard!; McNicholas, Maritime Security; Burnett, Dangerous Waters; Davis, Terrorism; Langewiesche, Outlaw Sea. 3. Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1. Although Caribbean coasts and trade routes were highly attractive to commerce raiders, piracy was by no means limited to this region of the Atlantic. Hospitable ports and busy trade routes farther north offered similar opportunities for profits, as ships traveling from North America to Europe preferred to navigate along the Gulf Stream and westerlies, which brought them within range of coastal freebooters there. McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 82. 4. Raddall, Halifax, 47; Anon., The Grand Pyrate, 1–31; Clapp, Fisher, and Jurica, Documents in English Economic History, 305; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, 2:527. Pirate crews used a variety of vessels, favoring small and swift frigates equipped with fire ports. In some cases, pirates were forced to use artillery and grappling irons to immobilize and then storm aboard their prizes, though at other times merchant captains surrendered their cargoes in exchange for their lives or liberty. Anon., The Grand Pyrate, 1–31; Rhode Island, Court of Vice-Admiralty, Tryals of thirty-six persons for piracy, 4; Besson, Scourge of the Indies, 21–22. 5. Quoted in Besson, Scourge of the Indies, 6. 6. Quoted in Cheyney, “International Law under Queen Elizabeth,” 660; Besson, Scourge of the Indies, 3–4. The authorization of commerce raiding quoted in the text (by Francis I) reflected the growing diplomatic, military, and commercial rivalry between France and Spain.

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Notes to Pages 2–6

7. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 256, 281–85; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 127, 144; Ritchie, Captain Kidd, vi, 235–36; Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 10–12, 16; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 232; Baugh, Naval Administration, xiii; Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, 19; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 36–59, 260; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 51–53; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 1; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 165, 191; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 9; Baer, British Piracy, 1: xiv, xvii; Little, Sea Rover’s Practice, 15–16; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 128; Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, 272; Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 8–9; Colas and Mabee, “Flow and Ebb of Private Seaborne Violence,” 97–103. Mark Hanna concurs with other historians about the timing of piracy’s demise, but argues that it was suppressed by courts and imperial and colonial officials in port towns, rather than through a naval campaign at sea. 8. See, for example, Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 25–26, 127. 9. Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 8; Lazaro, “Predation’s Place within Profit,” 250, 275; Colas and Mabee, “Flow and Ebb of Private Seaborne Violence,” 101–3; Burgess, “Piracy in the Public Sphere,” 896; Swanson, “Privateering in Early America,” 255. 10. Colley, Britons, xiv–xv, 378–81. See also Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe, 239–40, 255, 257–59; Price, British Society, 157–62; Charters, “Disease, War and the Imperial State,” Conclusion; Cookson, British Armed Nation, 5–8, 11, 262; Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 8–11, 31–32; Benton, “Colonial Law and Cultural Difference,” 563–64; Greene, Peripheries and Center (1990), xi; Greene, “The Glorious Revolution and the British Empire”; Labaree, Patriots and Partisans, ix. See also Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman. 11. Technically, privateers were commissioned expressly to track and attack enemy ships in order to capture or destroy their cargoes, whereas letters of marque were merchant vessels authorized to violently seize enemy ships they happened to come across along their designated route. Thus privateers were outfitted as warships, to hunt for prizes, rather than to carry cargoes (and this is why crews on privateers received only a cut of the prizes they captured, rather than daily wages). The distinction between letters of marque and privateers was an eighteenth-century development, but even then it was mostly academic, as “privateer” was often used to describe both types of commissioned ship. Indeed, the commissions carried by both types of vessels were virtually identical. Such commissions authorized their holders to bring to port prizes that they had forcefully captured at sea. They were permitted to keep most of their loot, after giving a certain percentage to a royal benefactor and protector. On the legal origins and practical distinctions of privateering and letters of marque see Powell, Bristol Privateers, xv–xvii; Rodger, Wooden World, 130; Starkey, “Origins and Regulation of Eighteenth-Century British Privateering,” 70–72; Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, chaps. 2 and 3, appendix 1. 12. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 30–33; Woodbury, Great Days of Piracy, 204; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 240; Elleman, Forbes, and Rosenberg, Piracy and Maritime Crime, 7; Hillman and Gathmann, “Overseas Trade and the Decline of Privateering,” 730–31. 13. Colonial governors and magistrates were known to sell royal pardons privately to known pirates, after the fact, and letters of marque, prior to the fact. 14. Pro-smuggling and pro-freebooting sentiment is often understood as an outlaw discourse. While it did become an outlaw discourse by the late nineteenth century—as the nation-state asserted its authority legislatively, bureaucratically, and psychologically, and as it gained legitimacy in the hearts and minds of subjects and citizens—it was not so in the eighteenth. 15. By issuing letters of marque, kings converted throngs of pirates in the Atlantic into law-abiding privateers. Only by accepting the language of the law—that privateers were agents of the state and essentially distinct from pirates—as a credible description

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of reality can a modern observer claim that piracy disappeared in the early eighteenth century. Manuel Schonhorn, for example, posits that during the War of Spanish Succession, Atlantic pirates became privateering patriots to their respective nations, “and in these years, piracy almost disappeared from the seas.” It reappeared with greater vigor at war’s end. Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates, xx–xxi. Fox and Pike, as well, note the decline of piracy in wartime and its reemergence thereafter. Fox, “Jacobitism and the ‘Golden Age’ of Piracy,” 279; Pike, History of Crime in England, 2:371. 16. Pérotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor,” 29. Pérotin-Dumon argues that the powerful states and navies of the nineteenth century were anachronistically projected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians and laypeople onto the early modern past. See also Klooster, Illicit Riches; Koot, Empire at the Periphery; Matson, Merchants and Empire; Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”; Truxes, Defying Empire; Morieux, “Diplomacy from Below.” 17. Present-day sensibilities regarding law and state power are reflected back by certain types of eighteenth-century sources. Such sources provide modern readers with a reassuring, but misplaced, sense of order with regard to maritime shipping and trade. .

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1. Atlantic Frontier: Continued Piracy through the Long Eighteenth Century 1. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 256, 281–85; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 127, 144; Ritchie, Captain Kidd, vi, 235–36; Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 10–12, 16; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 232; Baugh, Naval Administration, xiii; Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, 19; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 30–33, 36– 59, 260; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 51–53; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 1; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 165, 191; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 9; Baer, British Piracy, 1: xiv, xvii; Little, Sea Rover’s Practice, 15–16; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 128; Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, 272; Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 8–9; Colas and Mabee, “Flow and Ebb of Private Seaborne Violence,” 101–3; Swanson, “Privateering in Early America,” 255; Elleman, Forbes, and Rosenberg, Piracy and Maritime Crime, 7. 2. Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 11–12, 16; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 282–85; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 165, 191. 3. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 51. 4. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 282–85, 256n4. 5. Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 128; Ritchie, Captain Kidd, vi, 235–36. 6. Baer, British Piracy, 1: xviii. 2: vii. 7. Innes and Styles, “The Crime Wave,” 392–95. 8. Valuable histories of the marine insurance industry in the Atlantic World can be found in Brown, Hazard Unlimited; Martin, History of Lloyd’s and of Marine Insurance; Ruwell, Eighteenth-Century Capitalism; Spooner, Risks at Sea; and Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s. 9. Barbour, “Marine Risks and Insurance,” 569–70; Hancock, Citizens of the World, 104–7; Go, Marine Insurance in the Netherlands, 23–24; Ebert, “Early Modern Atlantic Trade,” 100–102; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 142–44. The risks of privateering, too, were addressed in this fashion. While privateers were sometimes owned and outfitted by individuals, they were often owned and financed by associations of investors. Such shareholders often owned shares in a number of privateering partnerships to diversify their investments and further diminish risk of loss. Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 206–7; White, Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1:316; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 11–12, 26–27. Another form of risk-sharing involved granting sailors permission to transport their own commercial cargo on board ships that they served. This attracted motivated men to serve for reduced wages, while giving these sailors a stake in a voyage’s success.

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Notes to Pages 11–12

Fishing vessels and privateers often operated similarly, granting officers and men shares of the catch (or of prizes), rather than wages. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 21–23. 10. Ebert, “Early Modern Atlantic Trade,” 100–102. Long distance trade (with West Africa and the Americas and in the Indian Ocean) spurred the adoption of premium insurance. Marine insurance was originally, in the late Middle Ages, offered in the form of maritime loans, which provided financing for voyages and, in cases of loss at sea, also insurance, as losses went to the lender. The high value of cargoes in long-distance trade, combined with the high risk involved, represented a significant financial burden on maritime lenders (by tying up capital in lengthy voyages). This facilitated the shift to premium-based marine insurance in colonial trades. Indeed, traditional intra-European trade routes (for ships carrying grain and other low-value cargoes) often retained the more traditional form of insurance (maritime loans) as late as the mid-seventeenth century. Ebert, “Early Modern Atlantic Trade,” 102–4. For an opposing view on insurance in bulk trades, see Leonard, “Contingent Commitment,” 58. 11. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 377. 12. London underwriters developed a reputation for paying more generously and readily than others, which enabled them to attract clients away from foreign underwriters. Johnson, Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, 8; Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 82; John, “The London Assurance Company,” 127; Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 86. 13. Britain, Sovereign, An Act for better securing certain powers and privileges. 14. Crowhurst, Defence of British Trade, 85–86, 90; Brewer, Sinews of Power, 194; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 88, 377; Shepherd and Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America, 76–77, 89; John, “The London Assurance Company,” 140; Steele, The English Atlantic, 225–27. The increase in coverage might itself have been a function of lower premiums, with cheap rates inducing buyers to reduce their risk by insuring up to 99 percent of cargo value. 15. Spooner, Risks at Sea, 57, 158–59, 176; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 318–20. 16. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 320–29; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 502. 17. For example, the early eighteenth century saw a decline in the average number of co-owners of single ships. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 88. 18. Steele, The English Atlantic, 225–27; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 347–48; Mitchell, Premium on Progress, 9–10; Kingston, “Marine Insurance,” 392–93. The market expanded in Britain as well during the eighteenth century, with local brokers, independent underwriters, and mutual-insurance clubs offering their services in most port cities. 19. Ruwell, Eighteenth-Century Capitalism, 70–72, 78, 88–89, 104, 127; Crothers, “Commercial Risk and Capital Formation”; Kingston, “Marine Insurance,” 392–97. In America, more than in England, economic conditions and lack of governmental regulation encouraged the formation of insurance firms by allowing them to compete effectively with private underwriters. More than private underwriters, insurance companies had reserves of capital and access to credit, which enabled them to assume greater risks; for example, one firm could cover a large cargo that in the past would have been insured in portions by a collection of individual underwriters. Ruwell, Eighteenth-Century Capitalism, 103–27; Kingston, “Marine Insurance,” 379–80, 391, 395–97. 20. Reduced rates and increased coverage primarily cut into underwriters’ profits. Early on, underwriters’ profit margins were quite high—up to 66 percent—but the expansion of the insurance market and increased competition came primarily at the expense of these profits. Steele, The English Atlantic, 225–27. Technological improvements relating to the sailing qualities of vessels, better techniques for packing cargoes to avoid average losses, and better maps may have played some role in reducing

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expected losses (and premiums). But these improvements would have reduced payouts and thus cannot explain the decline in underwriters’ profit margins. Another factor that allowed premium reduction was improved information gathering (that is, risk assessment) by local underwriters and agents about vessels’ seaworthiness, cargoes, and conditions at sea. 21. Posthumus, Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland, 1: lxiv–lxv. The premium offered for a voyage from South America to Portugal was still 5 percent in 1774. Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees, 1:73–74. 22. Swanson, “American Privateering and Imperial Warfare,” 380; Gillingham, Marine Insurance in Philadelphia, 67–68; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 495; Kingston, “A Broker and His Network,” 12; Pierce, Tobacco Coast, 324–26; Spooner, Risks at Sea, 57, 158–59, 176; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 77, 158; White, Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1:487. 23. Ruwell, Eighteenth-Century Capitalism, 88, 91, 159; Spooner, Risks at Sea, 86–96, 171, 176, 205–35, 258–86. 24. Merchant letterbooks point to bad weather far more than commerce raiding as a source of risk in both wartime and peace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the height of the Seven Years’ War, for example, Thomas Greg purchased insurance against “all risks but the Enemy.” Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 230, 257, 264, 297; Pringle, Letterbook, 2:607; Freeman, Letters, 228, 254, 275. 25. Salem Insurance Companies Records, 1779–1893, MSS 139, box 2, folders 5 and 6, and vols. 13, 14, and 15, Peabody Essex Museum collections, Salem, MA. These data comport with rates offered by other underwriters in Massachusetts in this period. Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees, 1:73–74. 26. Salem Insurance Companies Records, 1779–1893, MSS 139, vols. 4, 8, 9, 15, and box 2, folder 5, and box 5, folder 1, Peabody Essex Museum collections. 27. Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 348–49, quot. on 349; Martin, History of Lloyd’s and of Marine Insurance, 399. Over time, a legal distinction emerged between “perils of the seas” and “all other perils and dangers.” Pirates and enemies, according to this distinction, were perils on the sea, but not of it. This was a technical distinction that did not affect underwriters’ liability; it merely clarified the basis on which liability was enforced. Baily, Perils of the Sea, 2; Gow, Marine Insurance, 94n1. The decline in insurance rates toward the mid-nineteenth century reflects not only declining risks from violent seizure, but also from rough seas, thanks to improved nautical charts and the advent of steam shipping. See Glete, Navies and Nations, 2:418–19, 422. 28. Similarly, reduced rates in the mid-nineteenth century correlate with other evidence indicating a decline in Atlantic piracy and privateering that was a result of diminished profits from these trades with the emergence of stable peace economies and, later, free-trade policies in Britain. That said, other factors, such as steam-engine technology and improved navigation capabilities, doubtless accounted for reduced insurance rates during the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, however, insurance rates corroborate evidence gleaned from official reports, the press and personal accounts that piracy did not abate in the 1720s. 29. Tinling, Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, 1:326–27; Caledonian Mercury, issue 15357 (February 7, 1820); Pierce, Tobacco Coast, 355; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 230–32, 239. 30. Quoted in Baugh, Naval Administration, 62. 31. Massachusetts, Governor, By His Excellency Jonathan Belcher. 32. Ibid.; Anon., The tryals of sixteen persons for piracy; Cockburn, A faithful account of the distresses and adventures of John Cockburn; Boston News-Letter, October 31–November 8, 1734, 1; Boston News-Letter, June 26–July 3, 1735, 2; Weekly Rehersal, April 14, 1735, 2. 33. McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 98–99, 241n72.

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Notes to Pages 15–16

34. T 1/380/37, Treasury Board Papers and In-Letters, UK National Archives, Kew. In 1759, Parliament indeed enacted a statute (“Act to Explain and Amend an Act Made in the Twenty Ninth Year of his Present Majesty’s Reign, Intituled, An Act for the Encouragement of Seamen”), allowing the Admiralty to withhold and revoke commissions from small vessels—those under 100 tons, 10 guns, and 40 men. Britain, Statutes at Large, from the 30th to the 33rd year of King George II, 22:474–75, 479. 35. Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 1:337, 469. 36. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy, 579–80; Anon., The following circumstances relating to the famous Ansell Nickerson. 37. 78/306, State Papers Foreign, UK National Archives, Kew; Lloyd’s Evening Post and British Chronicle, issue 260 (March 16–19, 1759); Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, issue 15984 (May 5, 1780); Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty, issue 420 (December 7–10, 1771); Villette, Annals of Newgate, 1:110–11; Tinling, Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, 2:604; McLachlan, “Uneasy Neutrality,” 74. Another indication that piracies were still being committed in the late eighteenth century is a 1775 treatise on shipping and insurance, which outlines insurers’ and shipmasters’ liabilities and responsibilities in cases of losses due to piratical attacks. Parker, Laws of Shipping and Insurance, 94–97, 396. Similarly, a 1795 guidebook to officers at sea lists the expenses covered by insurance in cases of attacks by privateers or pirates. Steel, The Ship-Master’s Assistant, 208. 38. Whitehall Evening Post (1770), issue 5456 (March 31–April 3, 1781), issue 5887 (February 5–8, 1785); Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, issue 3901 (August 11, 1785); London Chronicle, issue 5212 (December 29–31, 1789); Connecticut, State, Acts and Laws, 537; United States, An Ordinance, to amend an ordinance, entitled, “An Ordinance for establishing courts for the trial of piracies and felonies committed on the high seas”; United States, Department of Foreign Affairs, The Secretary of the United States . . . reports the draft of an ordinance for the trial of piracies and felonies. Concerns over piratical seizures at sea are also evident in the 1785 commercial treaty between the United States and Prussia. It outlines procedures to be adhered to in the event of a neutral power’s ship being captured by a belligerent or by pirates. Martens, Essay on privateers, 210. 39. White, “The Marshall Court and International Law,” 730. In 1817, Senator David Daggett urged Congress to finally act on its constitutional mandate to define the crime of piracy as a way to deal more effectively with ongoing piracies afflicting American shipping. Daggett, In Senate of the United States. 40. Uhlig, How Navies Fight, 16; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 2–3. 41. US Circuit Court, Middle Circuit of the New-Jersey district, William Brigstock . . . Indictment for murder; Baker, Confession of Joseph Baker; Brous, Baker, and Peterson, Last words and dying confession of the three pirates. 42. Indeed, a Captain Lowe received a reward from Congress for saving American lives in the face of such an attack in 1805. Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 3; USCSS, 25th Cong., 2nd sess., House Document 129. 43. Britain, Court of Admiralty, Trial of Peter Atkins; Dowling, Report of the trial in the case of the King v. William Jemott. 44. Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 11. 45. Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1480; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 11–12. The London Times charged that the Royal Navy’s efforts were insufficient and demanded stronger government action to combat piracies in the Atlantic. Times, September 23, 1817, 2e. 46. Lowe, “American Seizure of Amelia Island,” 21–27; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 14–15. 47. White, “The Marshall Court and International Law,” 730; Anon., Lives and confessions of John Williams, Francis Frederick, John P. Rog, and Peter Peterson. 48. Earle, Pirate Wars, 218–19.

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49. Data collected from database of US National Archives, Southwest Region. 50. White, “The Marshall Court and International Law,” 727 (quot.), 733. Daniel Webster himself represented alleged pirates in front of the Supreme Court. 51. Scott, “Bonaparte Toscan and the Cuban Pirates,” 93. 52. Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 267, 277–83. 53. Britain, Admiralty Office, “An account of pirate vessels destroyed by ships of war on the Jamaica station, between the 1st of January 1821, and the 31st March 1823” (June 30, 1823), Peabody Essex Museum collections; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 314–17, 492–94, 1456–57, 1470–71, 1473–80, 1932–33, 1939; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 2–4, 6–25; Lowe, “American Seizure of Amelia Island,” 22–23, 24n28, 27; Dickinson, “Is the Crime of Piracy Obsolete?,” 348–49; Bradlee, Piracy in the West Indies, 23, 29–30, 33–37; Beehler, “The United States Navy and West India Piracy,” 2–3, 4–16. 54. Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 17, 97–98. 55. 28/89/4, 28/90/29, 28/90/40, 137/15, Colonial Office and Predecessors, UK National Archives, Kew; Morning Post, issue 15595 (March 10, 1821); Times, July 24, 1822, 3c; Times, August 1, 1822, 3a–b; Times, August 8, 1822, 2d; Times, November 18, 1822, 2d–e; Times, August 1, 1822, 3c; Britain, Court of Admiralty, Trial of Charles Christopher Delano; United States, Circuit Court, A correct report of the trial of Josef Perez; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 25–27, 29, 31–32, 35–36, 38–39, 49–50; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 84, 1936–37; Rowe, “The Maine West India Trade,” 173–74; Bradlee, Piracy in the West Indies, 23, 29–30, 33–37; Earle, Pirate Wars, 212, 215–18. See also McCarthy, Privateering, Piracy and British Policy in Spanish America. 56. Republican Compiler, June 28, 1820, 2. 57. Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 19–20. 58. USCSS, 16th Cong., 1st sess., Senate Document 100. 59. USCSS, 16th Cong., 2nd sess., House Document 38; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 20–21. 60. Times, July 24, 1822, 3c; August 1, 1822, 3a–b; August 8, 1822, 2d; and November 18, 1822, 2d–e. See also McCarthy, Privateering, Piracy and British Policy in Spanish America, 149–51. 61. USCSS, 17th Cong., 1st sess., House Report 53; USCSS, 17th Cong., 2nd sess., House Document 8; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 314–15. 62. USCSS, 17th Cong., 2nd sess., Senate Document 4. 63. Times, August 1, 1822, 3c. 64. USCSS, 18th Cong., 2nd sess., House Document 6. See also USCSS, 18th Cong., 2nd sess., House Document 14; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1932. 65. United States, Circuit Court, A correct report of the trial of Josef Perez; Member of the Bar, A brief sketch of the occurrences on board the brig Crawford; Anon., Piracy and Murder. 66. USCSS, 18th Cong., 1st sess., House Report 124; USCSS, 18th Cong., 2nd sess., House Report 22; USCSS, 18th Cong., 2nd sess., House Report 47; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1933–34; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 15–16. 67. Lycoming Gazette, April 15, 1829, 2. 68. Wiskonsan Enquirer, April 13, 1843, 1. The “right of visit” allowed naval vessels to stop ships at sea and examine their papers and the national flag under which they sailed to ascertain whether these were fraudulent. This was distinct from the “right of search,” which was deemed “a belligerent right exercised by a nation at war.” 69. 1/1/4, 1/2/4, Central Criminal Court: Depositions, UK National Archives, Kew; Anon., Trial of Peter Heamen and Francois Gautiez; Bayer, Dying declaration of Nicholas Fernandez; Anon., Confession of Chas. Gibbs; Congressional stenographer, A report of the trial of Pedro Gibert; United States, Circuit Court, Trial of the twelve spanish pirates; United States, Circuit Court, Supplement to the Report of the Trial of the Spanish Pirates.

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70. Tinling, Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, 1:327; CSP–Col, 16: xviii; Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates, xxi; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 14, 129–30, 323–28; Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders, 8. 71. Tinling, Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, 1:326–27. 72. Times, August 8, 1822, 2d (quot.), and November 18, 1822, 2d; Elleman, Forbes, and Rosenberg, Piracy and Maritime Crime, 7; Rodger, Wooden World, 318. 73. Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 63; Aube, “Worlds Apart,” 9–12, 17–18, 23–24, 35–36, 48, 160–99, 234–36. From 1785 to 1790, Spain paid as tribute to rulers in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli $4.5 million, the Netherlands $500,000, Sweden $340,000, and Venice $270,000. Aube, “Worlds Apart,” 9–24. 74. Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 113. 75. Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 338; Little, Pirate Hunting, 176; Rouse, “Early Shipping between England and Chesapeake Bay,” 133–35; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 3; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 37; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 29. 76. Anon., Lives, apprehensions, arraignments, and executions, of the 19. late pyrates; Anon., An exact narrative of the tryals of the pyrates; Anon., A true account of the proceedings, at the tryal held at the Marshalseas; Carew, Hinc Illae Lacrymae; Anon., An account of the behaviour, dying speeches, and execution of Mr. John Murphey; Loades, “From the King’s Ships to the Royal Navy,” 38; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 162n10. 77. Mark Hanna goes as far as saying that there was no naval war against piracy. Hanna argues that piracy was eradicated by 1730, but credits magistrates in colonial ports, rather than the Royal Navy, with this accomplishment. Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 14, 198–201, 323–28. 78. Conway, Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe, 240–43. 79. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 207, 410–13; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 164; Earle, Pirate Wars, 183, 188–89. 80. Earle, Pirate Wars, 193–206. Marcus Rediker provides a list of naval attacks on Atlantic pirates during this period. Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 143–47. 81. Earle, Pirate Wars, 212, 215–18. 82. De Souza, Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World, 168–72, 176, 181–85; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 52–53. 83. Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 76; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 45–46; Karraker, Piracy Was a Business, 129–30. 84. London Gazette, issue 5573 (September 14–17, 1717); London Gazette, issue 5706 (December 23–27, 1718). 85. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy, 315; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 78; Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 344–45; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 189; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 137; Pierce, Tobacco Coast, 354; Earle, Pirate Wars, 189–92. Like the British, the French Crown extended a general amnesty in 1718 to French pirates who would vow to cease and desist. As was the case with the British pardon, it had no discernible effect on pirate activity. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 411; Besson, Scourge of the Indies, 24. 86. Earle, Pirate Wars, 191–92. 87. Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1473–77; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 7. A newspaper report from 1822 tells of US naval cruisers capturing eight piratical vessels with 160 crewmen, including 21 men who returned to their old trade after being convicted in federal court of piracy and then pardoned by President Monroe. Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 316. 88. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence,” 474; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 174. 89. Hansel, “Observations on the Straits of Malacca,” 204. 90. Quoted in Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 129–30.

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91. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence,” 479–81. Lauren Benton argues that the extra-European world was seen not as a zone of lawlessness, but as “a zone of legal anomaly vis-à-vis the metropole.” Defined by different, and shifting, sets of laws and jurisprudence, such anomalous legal zones “came to be regarded as integral and expected elements of empire.” Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 28–33. 92. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence,” 507–9. 93. Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 15–16; Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence,” 497. 94. Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders, 7; Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 101–3. 95. Glete, Navies and Nations, 1:117, 2:478; Pérotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor,” 29–30. 96. The rights of the chartered trader in this respect are outlined in a 1705 decision by the High Court of Admiralty of Scotland. Bowrey, The case of the owners and freighters of the ship Worcester, 5–6. 97. Pérotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor,” 29–30, quot. on 29; Colas and Mabee, “Flow and Ebb of Private Seaborne Violence,” 87; Glete, Navies and Nations, 2:478. 98. Loades, “From the King’s Ships to the Royal Navy,” 42; Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 78; Glete, Navies and Nations, 1:55; Starkey, “A Restless Spirit,” 129–30; Conway, War, State, and Society, 107; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 8–9. This is evident, for example, in the size and strength of privateers. Such vessels ranged in strength from twenty or more guns and crews of over a hundred, to ships of only a handful of guns and small crews. These lightly armed vessels were clearly not outfitted for raiding but ranged into it when opportunity arose. See accounts of privateers in the War of American Independence in Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, vols. 1–4. 99. Sir Matthew Decker—merchant, MP, and director of the East India Company— articulated this economic ethos bluntly: “If the Exports of Britain exceed its Imports, Foreigners must pay the balance in Treasure and the Nation grow Rich.” Quoted in Matson, Merchants and Empire, 124. 100. Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 175, 196; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 266–72. 101. Mabee, “Pirates, Privateers and the Political Economy,” 140, 145 (quoting J. H. Parry); 151; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 410; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 241n72; Colas and Mabee, “Flow and Ebb of Private Seaborne Violence,” 87; Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” 287. 102. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 244–45. 103. Pérotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor,” 29–30, quot. on 29. 104. Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, 1:383; Swanson, Predators and Prizes, 194; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 410–11; Clark, “Insurance as an Instrument of War,” 255–57. During the War of Austrian Succession, insurance underwriters argued on mercantilist grounds against a Parliamentary prohibition of insuring enemy goods. They pointed out that profits to British insurers drew money out of the French economy. Their lobbying efforts, however, were not successful. Magens, Essay on Insurances, 1: vi–vii; Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, 1:383. 105. CSP–Col, 16:569; Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 1:470; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 12; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1478–80; Howarth, British Seapower, 206; Little, Sea Rover’s Practice, 20; Black, British Seaborne Empire, 79; Pierce, Tobacco Coast, 342–44, 354–56; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 17–18, 21–22, 70, 84–86; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 180, 184–85; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 203; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, 165. Jamaican records include repeated complaints from British captains of “being made Prize by People we esteemed our friends.” Robertson, Spanish Town Papers, 10–11, 55–56. Samuel Bellamy’s greatest capture came in the spring of 1717, when he and his crew chased down and

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boarded the Whydah, a 300-ton British slave ship on its return journey, loaded with a fortune in gold and precious trade goods. 106. New-York, Province, Anno Rregni Gulielmi & Mariae . . . quinto. An Act for restraining and punishing privateers and pyrates; Lloyd’s Evening Post, issue 6291 (December 18–20, 1797), 600; Morning Herald, issue 5381 (December 19, 1797); Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, vol. 1, Appendix 46; Tinling, Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, 2:537, 552; Esquemeling, Buccaneers of America, 65–67; Rogers, Life Aboard a British Privateer, 71; American citizen, An appeal to the government and Congress, 53–55; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 79–80; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 27, 39–40, 42–43, 50, 52, 56–57, 248n153; Lowe, “American Seizure of Amelia Island,” 21– 23, 24n28, 27; Marx, Pirates and Privateers, 131; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 44; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 168; Little, Sea Rover’s Practice, 21; Earle, Pirate Wars, 195; Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 173–74; Conway, Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe, 240, 249–51, 258; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 67. The guarda costas, Spain’s coast guard in the Americas, charged with enforcing Spain’s trading monopoly in the New World (that is, intercepting smugglers and unlawful traders), were mostly composed of privateers. Though they had Spanish commissions, many were foreigners. (And, like most privateers, they habitually took to piracy.) 107. See, for example, Massachusetts, Province, Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, 19:838. In some cases, such declarations were offered in English, French and Dutch. 108. Robertson, Spanish Town Papers, 10–11, 55–56. 109. Magens, Essay on Insurances, 2:357–66; Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder.” 110. Hodgson, River Thames Pirates; Rothert, Outlaws of Cave-In-Rock, 43–47. 111. Nalty, Noble, and Strobridge, Wrecks, Rescues, and Investigations, xvii–xviii; Pike, History of Crime in England, 2:269–71. 112. Bathurst, The Wreckers, 14–15, 19–20; Pearce, Cornish Wrecking, 61–71; Jenkin, Cornish Seafarers, 85. 113. American wrecking grounds stretched from Massachusetts to New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Florida. 114. An 1835 account of New Jersey’s coastal pirates (the Barnegat pirates were land pirates, or wreckers) reports a particular attack involving a gang of about a hundred such wreckers on a stranded ship. This account points out the vast wealth that these pirates extracted from their targets, as well as the communal assistance on which they depended locally. Niles’ Weekly Register, vol. 47 (1834–35), 333–34; Mitchell, Premium on Progress, 17.

2. Frustrated Aspirations: The Legal and Ethical Presumptions of the Early Modern State 1. Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 10–12, 16–19, quot. on 16–17. See also Kert, Trimming Yankee Sails, 13; Swanson, Predators and Prizes, 5–6; Marsters, Bold Privateers, 6; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 4–5; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 14–15; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 162; Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” 283–84, 286–87; Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, 31, 245; Jameson, Privateering and Piracy, ix; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 1–3, 31–33, 41–43, 47–49; Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 407–8; Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, 240; Earle, Pirate Wars, 195; Little, Sea Rover’s Practice, 19–20; Pike, History of Crime in England, 2:371; Garitee, The Republic’s Private Navy, 4–5, 7–8, 153, 226; Cable, Political Influence of Naval Force, 26. 2. Starkey, Pirates and Privateers, 3–5. Starkey points out that contemporaries viewed commissions held by Latin American privateers in the nineteenth century as they had Caribbean ones in the eighteenth century, as a loose legal cover for acts of piracy. He notes the untidy overlap between pirates and privateers during the imperial wars of the

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mid- and late eighteenth century, well after the alleged eradication of Atlantic piracy in the 1720s. 3. Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 22. 4. Jan Glete defines state building as the process by which political elites “create new structures and organizations designed to penetrate the society in order to regulate behavior in it and draw a larger volume of resources from it. State building is associated with increases in the regulative and extractive capabilities of the political system, a capability which is embodied in a centralized and penetrative bureaucracy.” Glete, Navies and Nations, 1:3. See also Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England. For a discussion of the relative merits of “state formation,” rather than “state building,” see Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 1–10, 96–98, 427–37. 5. Starkey, Pirates and Privateers, 3–4. 6. Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 18–19. 7. Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:139, 152–53, 246–49, 270–73, 291–93, 390–92, 413–35; Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 670–73. 8. Britain, Sovereign, Her Majesties most gracious declaration; United States, Continental Congress, By the United States in Congress assembled, April 7, 1781; Rhode Island, Governor, By His Excellency. 9. Maxwell, Spirit of Marine Law, 2:223–302; Martens, Essay on privateers, 50–52, 120. 10. Robinson, Reports of Cases, 1: iv–viii. 11. Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 27–29; Powell, Bristol Privateers, appendix 1, 355–59. 12. Britain, Statutes at Large, from the 30th to the 33rd year of King George II, 22:472–73, 475–78; Britain, Sovereign, Her Majesties most gracious declaration; Magens, Essay on Insurances, 2:488; Marsden, Reports of Cases, 186–87; Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:153, 246–49, 393; United States, Continental Congress, Instructions for Privateers; Denmark and Norway, Sovereign, Instructions for Privateers; Powell, Bristol Privateers, xvii; Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, 24–25. 13. Henretta, “Salutary Neglect,” 319. 14. Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 8, 198–99; Lazaro, “Predation’s Place within Profit,” 250, 275. 15. Colley, Britons, xiv–xv, 378–81. In “Diplomacy from Below and Belonging: Fishermen and Cross-Channel Relations in the Eighteenth Century,” Renaud Morieux describes commerce and local administration in French villages and towns along the English Channel. His study indicates that, like English townships, French communities exhibited a sharply localist political mentality, elevating local interests and practices above those of the national government. See also Robinson, Reports of Cases, 1:18; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 2–4; Payne, Fishing a Borderless Sea, xv, xxii, 31–33, 36, 38, 41–42, 45. 16. Greene, “The Glorious Revolution and the British Empire,” 263–66, quot. on 263; Greene, Peripheries and Center (1986), 62–65, 75, 235n18 (quot.). “Following the Glorious Revolution . . . the campaign for a consolidated empire, for the retrenchment of local authority in the colonies through the elimination of private colonies, securing permanent revenues, and restricting the authority of colonial legislatures was desultory, sporadic, unsustained, and, at best, only modestly successful.” Greene, “The Glorious Revolution and the British Empire,” 265–66. 17. Cookson, British Armed Nation, 5–8 (quot. on 5), 11, 262. 18. See, for example, Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted. In an open letter to a member of Parliament “concerning the Suppression of Piracy” published in 1700, the writer links this localism with the American colonies’ hospitality to pirates and smugglers. He notes that “several of our American Plantations are like petty Sovereigntys, having the Choice of Governours, the Power of calling Assemblies, making Laws. . . . Each of these,

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Interest being their chief Mover, are restlesly ambitious of advancing their Estates by drawing away the Trade and Inhabitants from other Colonies.” The elected officials of these colonies, the author reports, “endeavour to do nothing that may disoblige their Electors, lest the next year they are deprived of their Dignities. The Inhabitants of the Plantations abroad are too much addicted to abet and encourage both Pyrates and illegal Traders, as the Persons they gain no small advantage by corresponding with.” J. B., A letter to a member of Parliament. 19. Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:327–28; Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence,” 500. 20. Greene, “The Glorious Revolution and the British Empire,” 266–67, quot. on 267. In Peaceable Kingdoms, Michael Zuckerman describes, in great detail and with examples from daily life, town records, and provincial courts, communities—indeed an entire province—characterized by a localist political culture. Settlers did not recognize the provincial government’s authority to intervene in local matters; they did not believe that such matters fell within the central government’s jurisdiction. Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms, 10–45. Indeed, local constituents and officeholders were often oblivious to the legislative and judicial actions of their provincial legislatures. Olson, “EighteenthCentury Colonial Legislatures,” 545–50. 21. While in England bonds of patronage from center to periphery were at least somewhat useful in conforming local practice to metropolitan preference, in North America patronage was less common and less effective, given the relative paucity of executive offices to be given to supporters and clients, the widespread distribution of land in America, and the assemblies’ effective encroachment on executive privilege and independence. Bailyn, Origins of American Politics, 28–31, 72–80, 86–87, 102–3, 109–10; Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 38–40, 101–3. 22. Greene, Peripheries and Center (1986), 75. 23. Maritime League for the Restoration of Naval Rights by Great Britain, The Declaration of Paris, 1–2, 4–5; Maritime League for the Restoration of Naval Rights by Great Britain, The Declaration of Paris: Correspondence with Lord Cowley, 1; Piggot, The Declaration of Paris, 143–45; Bowles, The Declaration of Paris of 1856, vi–vii; Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 24. 24. Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 12, 81, 157, 175, 583; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 79. 25. Crocker, Extent of the Marginal Sea, 14–19; White, “The Marshall Court and International Law,” 728–29. Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum (1609) directly and purposefully contradicted English claims to exclusive sovereignty in British waters by upholding widely recognized practices of maritime trade. Grotius, The Free Sea. 26. Gentili, Hispanicae advocationis libri duo, 111. Gentili relied on a traditional English insistence that governmental authority to keep the peace and enforce laws was a product of a governmental presence in a particular territory (in this case, the ocean). For example, since Elizabeth I did not recognize the authority of “the bishop of Rome” to grant Spain dominion over the New World, any territories that were claimed by Spain solely on the strength of papal bulls were considered by her to be free for all. Cheyney, “International Law under Queen Elizabeth,” 660. It is significant that the Elizabethan patent authorizing Sir Humphrey Gilbert to plant a colony in America states that “we have given and granted . . . to our trustie and welbeloved servaunt Sir Humfrey Gilbert . . . free libertie and licence . . . to discover, find, search out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreys and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people, as to him . . . shall seeme good: and the same to have, hold, occupie and enjoy.” Slafter, Sir Humfrey Gylberte, 95–96, emphasis added. The standardized charter granted to English discoverers by Elizabeth’s predecessors denied them the right to discover and use lands that had been discovered by other princes “and which already are in the posses-

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sion of the said princes.” Quoted in Williams, American Indian in Western Legal Thought, 122. Elizabeth added a requirement that these princes must have actual possession of the discovered lands—that is, they must establish a governmental presence there—in order to possess a lawful claim to them; possession by prescription alone was deemed invalid. This requirement was applied to English colonial entrepreneurs as it was to the King of Spain. Thus Gilbert’s royal charter to plant a colony in Munster stated that “the grantees must occupy their lands or forfeit them.” Similarly, in 1581, the Privy Council demanded that Gilbert deliver up his patent “forasmuch as his intended vyoges and discoveries, & c., have taken no effecte.” Quinn, Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2:495, 2:242. Sir Thomas Smith was burdened by the same requirement after his first colony was wiped out by an Irish uprising. In order to preserve his title to the lands, he organized a second expedition to Ireland. Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577),” 549. 27. From the start, the crime of piracy—including the claim to state sovereignty at sea—was anchored in English civil law, rather than common law. Piracy came into being as a felony not from English case law, but through legislative action. While Henry VIII conferred jurisdiction on common-law courts to decide on piracy cases, the definitions of the offense, as well as the punishment for it, were found in the civil law. Burgess, “Piracy in the Public Sphere,” 897–98; McKinney and Rich, Ruling Case Law, 21:421; Williams, The Whole Law Relative to the Duty and Office of a Justice of the Peace, 3:555–59. 28. White, “The Marshall Court and International Law,” 728–29, 732–34; Dickinson, “Is the Crime of Piracy Obsolete?,” 339–40, 347–48; Benton, “Toward a New Legal History of Piracy,” 226n2, 228. Although rejected by the Marshall court, Parliament’s position regarding state jurisdiction at sea was adopted in some segments of American government, at least with regard to US persons, often with the suggestion that offenses on the high seas fell under the jurisdiction of the national government rather than state or local governments. Pennsylvania, Supreme Executive Council, Pennsylvania, ss. A proclamation; United States, An Ordinance, to amend an ordinance, entitled, “An Ordinance for establishing courts for the trial of piracies and felonies committed on the high seas”; United States, Department of Foreign Affairs, The Secretary of the United States . . . reports the draft of an ordinance for the trial of piracies and felonies. Even in the early twenty-first century, one can detect practical problems with the enforcement of universal jurisdiction at sea with regard to piracy offenses. Benton, “Toward a New Legal History of Piracy,” 226n2. 29. Harding, “ ‘Hostis Humani Generis,’ ” 23 (quot.), 38. 30. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 2–3. 31. Like Christopher Harding and J. E. Cookson, Lauren Benton warns against taking early modern states’ claims to legal sovereignty at face value. Such claims give the misleading impression of a unitary imperial state, with a comprehensive legal system, and with state-law ascendant. She describes early modern states as multicentric legal orders—“those in which the state is one among many legal authorities”—rather than a legal order that elevates the state law above other sources of law and authority. “Historians’ attention to the narrative of rising state power in Western Europe has tended to obscure the degree [to which fluidity in the legal order] was for participants an expected, even naturalized, aspect of the social order.” Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 8–11 (quot. on 11), 31–32 (quot.); Benton, “Colonial Law and Cultural Difference,” 563–64. Jack Greene’s and Eliga Gould’s assessments that peripheral consent was what endowed constitutional legitimacy on measures adopted by metropolitan governments reflects a similar appreciation of early modern legal structures and beliefs. Greene, Peripheries and Center (1990), xi; Gould, “Liberty and Modernity,” 113, 115–16, 128–29. See also Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire. 32. Rubin, “The Law of Piracy,” 196–206; Baer, British Piracy, 3:376; Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates, 377. This reflected the typical medieval policy of European states

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to leave seafarers to fend for themselves. “European maritime trade to a considerable extent grew out of an undifferentiated trade-and-plunder business where trade with partners who were stronger or equal in strength was profitable while inferior partners might be the object of plunder. Seafarers were used to fight both in order to protect themselves and their cargo and in order to eliminate competitors.” Glete, Navies and Nations, 2:478. 33. Rubin, “The Law of Piracy,” 196–206. 34. White, “The Marshall Court and International Law,” 730–31. The case of US v. Palmer was referred to the US Supreme Court (1818) because judges in a lower court disagreed over the definition of piracy and over what American laws were violated by acts of maritime predation beyond American waters. The Supreme Court decided that the absence of privateering commissions did not, in all cases, indicate piracy. Moreover, the court ruled that acts of maritime predation carried out by foreign vessels against foreign vessels were not acts of piracy according to American law and not punishable in the courts of the United States. 35. Burgess, “Piracy in the Public Sphere,” 888–90. 36. Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:157; Truxes, Defying Empire, 5, 94, 173, 176, 201–4; Pares, Yankees and Creoles, 128; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 198–210; Harman, Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 33, 40–42, 47–59; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 22–23; Klooster, Illicit Riches, 228, 240; Pierce, Tobacco Coast, 350. 37. West, Gunpowder, Government, and War, 119–21. 38. Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 150, 153–59, 168–75, 181–82. 39. CSP–Col, 16:256–57, 303, 398, 481, 562; Burgess, Pirates’ Pact, 212–15; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 66; Bailyn, New England Merchants, 182. 40. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 66, 133–34; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1936–37. 41. Magens, Essay on Insurances, 2:357–66; Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder,” 167, 172–78, 185–86. It appears that local communities in England did not recognize the authority of the Coastguard to salvage stranded vessels, despite their lawful duty to do so. Wrecking was seen by many along English coastlines as legitimate commercial activity. Wrecked cargoes were believed to be free for all and beyond the government’s right to restrict. Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder,” 177. 42. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption,’ 1. It is telling, in this respect, that Defoe appropriates St. Augustine’s famous tale of a confrontation between Alexander the Great and a captured pirate, casting Captain “Black Sam” Bellamy as the indignant pirate. Bellamy charges that rulers are themselves bandits, on par with him and his peers, but surpassing them in the scope of their banditry. Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates, 582. 43. The traditional letters of marque and reprisal were different and much more restrictive than the privateering commissions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. While the latter were, essentially, wartime naval commissions, the former was legal authorization for a merchant or captain whose cargo was seized by a ship of another state to make prizes of that state’s ships—if that state’s courts did not offer legal remedy—to recapture the value of the original loss. Powell, Bristol Privateers, xv–xvii; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 199–200; Starkey, “Origins and Regulation of Eighteenth-Century British Privateering,” 70–72; Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” 36n83. 44. Sun, issue 545 (June 27, 1794); Morning Post, issue 15595 (March 10, 1821); American citizen, An appeal to the government and Congress, 53–55; Boston News-Letter, issue 1637 (June 26–July 3, 1735), 2; Esquemeling, Buccaneers of America, ix; Rogers, Life Aboard a British Privateer, 87; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 3, 178, 207; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 230–32, 239; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 36; Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 5–6; Craven, “The Earl of Warwick,” 459; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 22; Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 300. 45. Martens, Essay on privateers, 3, note b; Schlegel, Neutral Rights, 46–47, 85–86.

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46. CSP–Col, 14:634. 47. Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, 5:27, 6:146, 244; Scott, Armed Neutralities, 331–32. Other instances can be found in 42/25/209, Home Office, UK National Archives, Kew; CSP–Col, 14:639–40, 16:326. 48. Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 1:470, 2:327–38; Weskett, Complete Digest of the Theory, Laws, and Practice of Insurance, 398; Magens, Essay on Insurances, 1:437–38, 444, 446–48, 451–52, 468; Schlegel, Neutral Rights, 46–47, 85–86; Vattel, Law of Nations, 399–400; Martens, Essay on privateers, 2–3, 29; Campbell, Spanish Empire in America, 288, 316; 137/143, Colonial Office and Predecessors, UK National Archives, Kew; CSP–Col, 16:74, 163, 522; Britain, High Court of Admiralty, Proceedings on His Majesty’s Commission of Oyer and Terminer, 18–19; Britain, Statutes at Large, from the 30th to the 33rd year of King George II, 22:472; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 22, 46–62; Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 113; Klooster, Illicit Riches, 102–3; Shepherd and Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America, 82; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 4–5; McLachlan, “Uneasy Neutrality,” 69–71; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 14–15; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 162; Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” 283–84, 286–87; Jameson, Privateering and Piracy, ix; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 1–3, 31–33, 41–43, 47–49; Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 407–8; Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, 240; Earle, Pirate Wars, 195; Little, Sea Rover’s Practice, 19–20; Pike, History of Crime in England, 2:371; Garitee, The Republic’s Private Navy, 4–5, 7–8, 153, 226; Conway, War, State, and Society, 40; Cable, Political Influence of Naval Force, 26; McCarthy, Privateering, Piracy and British Policy in Spanish America, 23–33, 157–58, 161–62. 49. Ordinary’s Accounts, December 22nd, 1721 (OA17211222), 3–4, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, www.oldbaileyonline.org. In July 1758, the Commissioners of the Customs requested that letters of marque issued to small vessels be recalled, as they were being used as a cover for smuggling and piracy. T 1/380/37, Treasury Board Papers and InLetters, UK National Archives, Kew. 50. Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 4–5; Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire,” 706–12, 720; Benton, “Toward a New Legal History of Piracy,” 239; Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 113– 16; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 173; Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” 287; Fox, “Jacobitism and the ‘Golden Age’ of Piracy,” 282; Burgess, Pirates’ Pact, 209–15; Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, 240; Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 5. 51. Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 213–14. A 1698 report by Governor Bellomont of New York to the Council of Trade and Plantations states that the privateering commissions offered by his predecessors amounted to licensing outright piracy, pointing out that these privateers “have since been the worst of pirates.” CSP–Col, 16:227. 52. McLachlan, “Uneasy Neutrality,” 69; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 54–56. 53. Starkey, “A Restless Spirit,” 129–30; Glete, Navies and Nations, 1:55; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 8–9; Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” 287; Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 78. 54. Observator (1702), issue 87 (February 10, 1705–February 14, 1705). 55. Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 980; Starkey, “A Restless Spirit,” 129–30; Loades, “From the King’s Ships to the Royal Navy,” 42; Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 78; Glete, Navies and Nations, 1:55; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 8–9. 56. Tinling, Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, 2:535, 537–38; Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 19; Starkey, “A Restless Spirit,” 127; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 292–93; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 178–79; Swanson, Predators and Prizes, 34; Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates, xxi; Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders, 12–13; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 91. 57. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 16–17, 39–40; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 21. 58. Britain, Statutes at Large, from the 30th to the 33rd year of King George II, 22:472–73, 475–78; Powell, Bristol Privateers, xvii; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 48–52, 54–64.

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Notes to Pages 39–41

59. Britain, Statutes at Large, from the 30th to the 33rd year of King George II, 22:472–82. 60. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, 30–31; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 22, 49–52. 61. While a British vessel captured in January 1760 waited a mere eighteen months for a verdict, which upheld the legality of seizure, other cases lingered in court much longer. Marsden, Reports of Cases, 164–71, 183–84; Roscoe, Reports of Prize Cases, 1:152–68; Leiner, “ ‘The Sport of Arbitrary Men,’ ” 1158–63. 62. Courts were legitimately hesitant to accept at face value titles of ownership held by allied or neutral nationals. Owners of single ships and the cargoes they transported were varied. Moreover, they were interested in listing their cargoes as belonging to a number of polities, allowing them to claim both neutrality and access. Thus ascertaining the legal titles to ships and cargoes was as difficult then as it is today. See Robinson, Reports of Cases, 1:3–16, 18–19, 21, 32–42, 74, 86–90, 103–7, 109–13; Langewiesche, Outlaw Sea, 93–95. 63. Pares, Colonial Blockade, 22, 148–52. French courts were accused by foreign merchants of disregarding French prize laws during the War of American Independence [78/305, State Papers Foreign, UK National Archives, Kew], but during the French Revolutionary Wars, laws and regulations were actually amended to give legal cover to existing French practices. The revolutionary Directory shortened court proceedings in 1798 to deny allies and neutrals time to present evidence against French privateers, and defined enemy ships by the content of their cargoes, thus deeming any ship carrying British goods as a legal prize. Scott, Armed Neutralities, 129–30. 64. Times, September 23, 1817, 2e (quot.); and August 1, 1822, 3b. 65. USCSS, 18th Cong., 2nd sess., House Report 398. 66. USCSS, 18th Cong., 1st sess., House Report 124; Beehler, “The United States Navy and West India Piracy,” 2–3; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1928–29, 1933; Earle, Pirate Wars, 218–19, 234. 67. Ordinary’s Accounts, December 22nd, 1721 (OA17211222), 3–4, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, www.oldbaileyonline.org; Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 1:470, 2:327–28; Weskett, Complete Digest of the Theory, Laws, and Practice of Insurance, 398; Magens, Essay on Insurances, 1:437–38, 444, 446–48, 451–52, 468; Schlegel, Neutral Rights, 46–47, 85–86; Vattel, Law of Nations, 399–400; Martens, Essay on privateers, 2–3, 29; Campbell, Spanish Empire in America, 288, 316; 137/143, Colonial Office and Predecessors, UK National Archives, Kew; CSP–Col, 16:74, 163, 227, 522; Britain, High Court of Admiralty, Proceedings on His Majesty’s Commission of Oyer and Terminer, 18–19; Britain, Statutes at Large, from the 30th to the 33rd year of King George II, 22:472; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 22, 46–62; Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 113; Klooster, Illicit Riches, 102–3; Shepherd and Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America, 82; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 4–5; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 30–31, 34; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 14–15; McLachlan, “Uneasy Neutrality,” 69–71; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 162; Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” 283–84, 286–87; Jameson, Privateering and Piracy, ix; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 1–3, 31–33, 41–43, 47–49; Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 407–8; Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, 240; Earle, Pirate Wars, 195; Little, Sea Rover’s Practice, 19–20; Pike, History of Crime in England, 2:371; Garitee, The Republic’s Private Navy, 4–5, 7–8, 153, 226; Cable, Political Influence of Naval Force, 26. This was clearly the case in the well-publicized instances in which colonial governors sold letters of marque or royal pardons to known pirates. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 50; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 50–51; Best, “Licensed to Steal,” 97–98; Burgess, Pirates’ Pact, 215. 68. In a study of the rights of neutral vessels published in 1801, Johan F. W. Schlegel (a professor of law at the University of Copenhagen) discusses the public apprehension of privateers as “another species of pirates.” He notes that, considering “the pillage, the vexations, the violence in which they indulge themselves, in contempt of the most severe laws” and their habitual disregard “for the treaties and regulations of their sovereigns,”

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“this popular opinion will not appear so ill founded.” Schlegel, Neutral Rights, 46–47, 85–86. See also Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 3, 6. 69. London Journal, June 5, 1731, 2; Campbell, Spanish Empire in America, 289, 310; Tinling, Correspondence of the Three William Byrds, 1:363–34, 2:547; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 16–17; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 22, 42–43; Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire,” 706–12, 720; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 203–5; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 89–91. The Spanish Crown did not fund guarda costas. Rather, private recipients of government contracts or monopolies showed their appreciation for such largess by supporting the operations of local coast guards. This funding system further blurred distinctions between coast guards and commerce raiders. 70. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 41, 67. 71. Anon., To the President and Congress of the United States. 72. Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1462–69, 1474–77, 1482–83; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 7, 9. 73. See, for example, Britain, Statutes at Large, from the 30th to the 33rd year of King George II, 22:472–82; Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:327– 28; 137/143, Colonial Office and Predecessors, UK National Archives, Kew; CSP–Col, 16:74, 163, 522; McLachlan, “Uneasy Neutrality,” 70–71. 74. Martens, Essay on privateers, 25; Daily Courant, issue 6481 (July 30, 1722); London Evening Post, issue 4727 (February 21–23, 1758); Old Common Sense or The Englishman’s Journal, issue 46 (December 17, 1737); Baer, British Piracy, 1:101–6, 2:346–47; Bowen, Ships for All, 210; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 5; Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 1, 5. 75. Parker, Laws of Shipping and Insurance, 39–40; Baer, British Piracy, 3:376; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 39–40. 76. Lazaro, “Predation’s Place within Profit,” 244. 77. Post Man and the Historical Account, &c., April 12–15, 1701, 1. 78. T 1/688/239–240, Treasury Board Papers and In-Letters, UK National Archives, Kew. 79. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 5, 167–69, 208. 80. Ibid., 141–42, 146–50, 158–60. 81. Ibid., 10–15, 41. 82. Esquemeling, Buccaneers of America, xii–xiii; Anon., The Grand Pyrate, 1–31; CSP– Col, 14:114, 134, 519, 16: vi–vii, xi–xv, 112–14, 256–57, 303, 398, 481, 562; Niles’ Weekly Register, vol. 47 (1834–35), 333–34; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 15, 18–19; USCSS, 18th Cong., 1st sess., House Report 124; Best, “Licensed to Steal,” 104–5; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 331–36, 341–44; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 241n72; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 30, 37–38, 57; Besson, Scourge of the Indies, 23; Karraker, Piracy Was a Business, 66–104, 138–40, 158, 203–8; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, 2:271–72; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 1–3, 141–42, 146–50, 158–60; Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 2:427; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 95, 108–9, 111, 119–97; Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 131, 192–95; Beehler, “The United States Navy and West India Piracy,” 2–3; Burgess, Pirates’ Pact, 204–11; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 50–51; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 9–14, 18, 22–23, 29–33, 39, 52–54; Bowen, Ships for All, 201; Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 342–44, 349; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 133–34; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 65–67, 74–75, 95–97; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 82; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 232; Haring, Buccaneers in the West Indies, 235–36, 253; Mitchell, Premium on Progress, 17; Pierce, Tobacco Coast, 206. Studies such as Kenneth Andrews’s Trade, Plunder, and Settlement illustrate how English piracy was central to early ventures of New World trade and settlement. Colonial economies remained closely associated with piratical trade thereafter, in

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Notes to Pages 44–45

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, Rhode Island and South Carolina authorities overvalued Spanish and Arabian coins in order to draw pirates to their ports and away from other colonial markets. Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 100–101. In 1704, New York’s Provincial Council invited a pirate captain from Rhode Island to bring his prizes to New York by assuring him that the colony’s Vice Admiralty judge did not interfere with or impose fines on such trade. Such competition over the business that freebooters could direct to their ports was common among the colonial governments of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 57; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 50–51; New York, Governor, An Ordinance of His Excellency. In 1701, Barbados issued new, more generous terms for privateers. The government stipulated that this new act be printed and distributed in New England to inform merchants and sailors there that Barbados will offer them a particularly cooperative port and court. Barbados, Province, An Act to incourage privateers. 83. As early as the sixteenth century, local gentry and magistrates supported and encouraged trade with pirates in western England and Wales; some were active participants in, or backers of, piratical expeditions. Queen Elizabeth herself, like other members of her administration, had been such an investor, purchasing a 10 percent share of a privateering vessel. Lipson, Economic History of England, 3:210–11; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 344–45; Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 206–7; White, Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1:316. 84. Best, “Licensed to Steal,” 102; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 25, 36–46; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, 2:271–72; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 11–12, 26–27; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 83; Grassby, Business Community, 212; Swanson, “American Privateering and Imperial Warfare,” 358. The crews (who invested their labor and risked their lives) split the profits with the financial backers of these ventures. Spanish noblemen captured in such attacks were sometimes offered in public auction to anyone who was willing to house and feed them while waiting for their ransoms to be paid. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, 2:69–70. 85. Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 96–98. 86. USCSS, 16th Cong., 1st sess., Senate Document 100; USCSS, 18th Cong., 1st sess., House Report 124; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 5, 10–13, 15, 18–19, 28–31, 33, 37, 45–46, 50, 59; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 321, 1202–3, 1936–37; Beehler, “The United States Navy and West India Piracy,” 2–3; Garitee, The Republic’s Private Navy, 227–28; De Grummond, Renato Beluche, 39–41, 69–73. Friendship, material support, and legal support for pirates—river pirates, regarded as legitimate traders in their communities—could be observed inland as well in this period. Horwood and Butts, Pirates and Outlaws of Canada, 143–52. 87. Swanson, “American Privateering and Imperial Warfare,” 358; Swanson, Predators and Prizes, 74; Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 20; Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence, 47–48, 65–66. 88. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, 293–304; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 198; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 25. 89. For example, after remaining relatively stable for a decade following the Seven Years’ War, insurance rates for Caribbean traffic rose consistently following the outbreak of the American war. Following the French declaration of war, rates swelled by 70–110 percent in both Caribbean and British waters, remaining stable until 1781. Similarly, the United States’ involvement in the Quasi-War against France, in the late 1790s, occasioned a 100–400 percent spike in insurance rates for maritime traffic beyond American coastal waters. Spooner, Risks at Sea, 86–96, 171, 176, 205–35, 258–86; Ruwell, Eighteenth-Century Capitalism, 88, 91; White, Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1:390, 411, 3:1365, 1368; Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 82–83.

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90. References in merchant letterbooks to seizures by pirates and privateers are rare. (More common are references to investment or involvement in commerce raiding.) The silence on losses caused by maritime predation reflects the fact that bad weather and navigation missteps represented a significantly greater risk to shipping than commerce raiding. Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 230, 257, 264, 297; Pringle, Letterbook, 2:607; Freeman, Letters, 228, 254, 275. This silence should not be taken as evidence of a lull in enemy privateering in wartime, or of continued raiding in times of peace. 91. CSP–Col, 14:84; Rhode Island, Province, Records of the Colony, 3:334, 351; Whitehall Evening Post (1770), issue 5456 (March 31–April 3, 1781); Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire,” 717–18; Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade, 83; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 62–63; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 3, 159–60, 185, 189n94, 311; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 50; Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder,” 174–75; Pearce, Cornish Wrecking, 123–26; Jenkin, Cornish Seafarers, 16–27, 41–58; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 22–23, 29–33; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 241n72. 92. Maxwell, Spirit of Marine Law, 2:220–22; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 32, 108; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 3, 7; National Maritime Museum (Britain), Piracy and Privateering, 4; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 26. Royal governors were designated by the Admiralty as Vice Admirals of their provinces, thereby authorizing a Vice Admiralty court in these provinces. 93. Robertson, Spanish Town Papers, 14, 55–56. 94. CSP–Col, 14:213, 228, 504–5, 15:345, 16: xviii; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, 2:271–72; Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 192–95; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 50–51. 95. CSP–Col, 14:114, 134, 16: vi–vii, xi–xv, 88, 121, 211, 215, 367, 398, 481; Burgess, Pirates’ Pact, 165–67, 174–78, 181–82, 186, 204–15; Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 192–95; Earle, Pirate Wars, 185; Barrow, Trade and Empire, 68–71; Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 349; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 96–98. Edward Randolph famously described the mainland and Caribbean colonies as receptacles of pirates. Governor Joseph Dudley, of Massachusetts, used the same term to describe Rhode Island. 96. CSP–Col, 16:323–26. 97. Matson, Merchants and Empire, 85–87; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 51; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 50–51. 98. Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 192–95; Burgess, Pirates’ Pact, 175–78, 184–89, 191–92, 201–4. 99. Massachusetts, Province, By the governour and Council assembled at Boston; Hughson, Carolina Pirates, 22–23, 29–33; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 69–70. Although provincial legislatures and governors continued to enact anti-piracy legislation in conformity with Parliamentary statutes (see, for example, Massachusetts Bay, Province, Charters and General Laws, 296–98; Pennsylvania, Province, Minutes of the Provincial Council, 2:13, 24), there was little appetite to enforce these laws. 100. Certain violations of British statutory law, when committed at sea, were deemed to fall within the jurisdiction of the British Admiralty. An indictment of pirates tried in Rhode Island in 1723, for example, stated that they had acted as pirates “upon the High Sea within the jurisdiction of the Admiralty of Great Britain.” Rhode Island, Court of Vice-Admiralty, Tryals of thirty-six persons for piracy, 2–3. Other European governments followed suit, creating juridical bodies that allowed the trying of pirates beyond their borders. Benton, “Toward a New Legal History of Piracy,” 232. 101. Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 27, 136–37; National Maritime Museum (Britain), Piracy and Privateering, 5. 102. Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 31–35, 139–42.

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103. Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 135–36; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 50; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 50–51; Best, “Licensed to Steal,” 97–98. 104. Anon., An account of the behaviour and last dying speeches of the six pirates. 105. Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 160. 106. USCSS, 18th Cong., 1st sess., House Report 124; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 130– 31; Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 3, 141–42, 146–50, 158–60; Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 342–43; Marx, Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean, 131; Beehler, “The United States Navy and West India Piracy,” 2–3; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 15, 18–19. 107. Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” vi, 60. 108. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering, 3, 6, 210 (quot.). 109. CSP–Col, 16: xviii (quot.), 204. 110. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence,” 507. 111. Martens, Essay on privateers, 2–3 (quots. on 3), 29.

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3. Holding the Bag: The Marine Insurance Industry’s Role in Perpetuating and Combating Piracy 1. On the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evolution of marine insurance in Europe (specifically, premium insurance practices), see Ebert, “Early Modern Atlantic Trade”; Leonard, “Origins and Development of London Marine Insurance.” 2. Bruijn, “Productivity, Profitability, and Costs,” 181–82; Swanson, Predators and Prizes, 187, 194; Swanson, “American Privateering and Imperial Warfare,” 359; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 320–29; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 266–72. 3. Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 175; Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 17, 20; Shomette, Pirates on the Chesapeake, 243–45, 252; Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 200; Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?, 203–4; Conway, War, State, and Society, 106. 4. See, for example, Jarvis’s In the Eye of All Trade on the beneficial effects of piracy and wrecking on the Bermudan economy (84–85). British Merchants saw the outfitting of privateers as a signal that soon “prize goods of all sorts will be Sold reasonable.” Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 196. 5. See Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 26–27, 127–29; Anderson, “Piracy and World History,” 179–80. 6. Greene, “Society and Economy in the British Caribbean,” 1517. 7. Breen, “ ‘Baubles of Britain,’ ” 77–87; Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 33–71; Shammas, “How Self Sufficient Was Early America?,” 258–61, 263–68; Hancock, Citizens of the World, 387–88. 8. In the course of five years in the mid-eighteenth century, a single British privateer operating in American waters was able to capture, or share in the capture, of twentyone prizes valued at roughly £50,000. John Plackard, a convict transported to America, was able, as a crewman on a privateer, to accumulate £400, more than double the annual income of a middle-class family. (Plackard spent all his savings in less than a year on his return to England.) Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 88; Villette, Annals of Newgate, 4:165; Boot, “Real Incomes of the British Middle Class,” 639–40; Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 97–98; Swanson, “American Privateering and Imperial Warfare,” 382. Sailors lived harsh and, often, short lives. (Samuel Johnson famously quipped about life at sea that “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned,” and that “a man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”) Sailors, therefore, had strong incentives for pursuing get-rich-quick schemes such as commerce raiding. 9. McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 241n72.

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10. Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 162; Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast, 349–50; Burgess, Pirates’ Pact, 169. 11. British and American merchants had a well-deserved reputation for trading with the enemy, by land and sea, during wartime. 12. Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 83; Brewer, Sinews of Power, 194–95, 198; Gwyn, Frigates and Foremasts, 78–79; Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 200. See also Bannerman, Merchants and the Military. 13. Privateering became a thriving industry by the middle of the eighteenth century, generating hundreds of commissions from the British Crown every year and allowing scores of thousands of sailors to earn a living from commerce raiding during the course of these wars. During the course of the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, New York’s shipping industry experienced a growth rate of over 400 percent—the number of ships increased from 99 to 447, the number of seamen from 755 to 3,552, and the tonnage from 4,513 to 19,514. In areas not actually touched by the ravages of combat, the wartime economy was beneficial for farmers, merchants, laborers, packers, millers, carters, warehousemen, dock workers, sailors, retailers, and merchants. Starkey, British Privateering Enterprise, 293–304; Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 266; Truxes, Defying Empire, 6, 173, 201–4. 14. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 114–26, 133, 135, 152–54; Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 81; Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?, 22. See also Bannerman, Merchants and the Military. 15. Rouse, “Early Shipping between England and Chesapeake Bay,” 133–35; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 3; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 37; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 29. For a discussion of protective convoys for British commercial vessels see Crowhurst, Defence of British Trade, 43–80. 16. For example, American privateers off the coast of Nova Scotia seized 38 British vessels a year, on average, between 1776 and 1779. Between 1780 and 1782, after the passage of the Convoy Act, only 21 ships a year were captured as prizes in those waters. Gwyn, Frigates and Foremasts, 79. 17. Barbour, “Marine Risks and Insurance,” 565–67. 18. White, Beekman Mercantile Papers, 2:589, 643, 649; Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:220–22; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 304–5, 308–9, 497; Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 62–63, 203; Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 116–17, 189; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 320–29; Barbour, “Marine Risks and Insurance,” 565–67, 591; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1205; Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 203–5; Flower and Jones, Lloyd’s of London, 72; Mason, John Norton & Sons, 404; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 70; Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder,” 168n2; Steele, “Review of Cornish Wrecking”; Conway, War, State, and Society, 106–8. 19. Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, 1:67, 131, 287–88, 319, 373, 6:446–47, 452; Roscoe, Reports of Prize Cases, 1:312, 492; Marsden, Reports of Cases, 176; Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:219; Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 189, 229–30, 287, 291; Pares, Yankees and Creoles, 112; Pares, Colonial Blockade, 42; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 303–22; Hornstein, The Restoration Navy, 22–25, 53–75, 90–96, 258–64. 20. Barbour, “Marine Risks and Insurance,” 567. 21. White, Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1:15, 2:589, 605, 628, 640, 643–44, 646, 649, 705; Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 203–5, 281–82; Flower and Jones, Lloyd’s of London, 72; Mason, John Norton & Sons, 404; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 303, 496–97; Spooner, Risks at Sea, 105–6, 167, 176–77, 198; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 70; Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder,” 168n2; Steele, “Review of Cornish Wrecking.”

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Notes to Pages 56–61

22. Ruwell, Eighteenth-Century Capitalism, 31–32, 34; Barbour, “Marine Risks and Insurance,” 571; Brewer, Sinews of Power, 194. 23. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 320–29; Barbour, “Marine Risks and Insurance,” 591; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1205. 24. Pares, Colonial Blockade, 19–24. See, for example, Marsden, Reports of Cases, 398– 99; Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:139, 222–24; Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 152–53, 254, 278, 290–91, 312, 315, 659–60. 25. This compensation mechanism mirrored the practice of European governments when negotiating prisoner-of-war exchanges. Charters, “Administration of War,” 93, 97. 26. Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:234–35. 27. White, Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1:43, 323–25, 420; Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 245, 322; Dixon, Practical Treatise on the Adjustment of General Average, 110–14; Parsons, Treatise on the Law of Marine Insurance, 563–66; Rodger, Wooden World, 317. See also Leeson and Nowrasteh, “Was Privateering Plunder Efficient?” 28. CSP–Col, 16:367. 29. Morning Post, issue 16140 (December 7, 1822). 30. White, Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1:15, 411, 487, 2:573–74, 576, 589, 605, 618, 628, 638, 640, 643–46, 649–50, 705; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 303, 496– 97; Spooner, Risks at Sea, 105–6, 167, 176–77, 198; Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 203–5; Flower and Jones, Lloyd’s of London, 72; Mason, John Norton & Sons, 404; Hull Packet and Humber Mercury, issue 2282 (August 12, 1828); Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 378, 385–86, 398, 410–11, 436, 438, 440. 31. Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 86. 32. Klooster, Illicit Riches, 103; Britain, Court of Admiralty, Trial of Charles Christopher Delano, 1–2. Similarly, in 1865, ten American insurance companies collectively hired an investigator to examine charges of deliberate wrecking on the part of the owner and captain of the Shooting Star, for which loss in the Gulf of Mexico they were liable. Hall, Bribery and Piracy, 5–15. 33. Britain, Parliament, An impartial report of the debates, 2:15; Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 203–5; Flower and Jones, Lloyd’s of London, 72; Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 70; Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder,” 168n2; Steele, “Review of Cornish Wrecking.” 34. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 227, 231–49; Grassby, Business Community, 224–25; Price, British Society, 157. See also Kammen, Empire and Interest; Olson, “The London Mercantile Lobby”; Olson, Making the Empire Work. 35. West, Gunpowder, Government, and War, 139–41. For a contrary assessment, see Leonard, “Origins and Development of London Marine Insurance.” 36. Barbour, “Marine Risks and Insurance,” 576–78. 37. It is important to note that in the private insurance market, most insurance underwriters were also merchants. Merchants used their credit and reputation in the merchant class, as well as contacts and agents in foreign ports, as assets in this new business opportunity. The emergence of insurance firms, however, in both Britain and North America, engendered greater professionalization and a clearer demarcation between the activities, associations, and interests of insurers and their customers. 38. Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 449–51; Earle, Pirate Wars, 233. 39. Caledonian Mercury, issue 15357 (February 7, 1820); Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1204–5, 1934–35, 2032; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 19. 40. Mitchell, Premium on Progress, 12–14, 17–20. 41. Ibid., 17–20. 42. Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 281–82; Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 449–51; Earle, Pirate Wars, 233.

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43. Hodgson, Lloyd’s of London, 55; Flower and Jones, Lloyd’s of London, 72; Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 77–81, 84–86, 90–100; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 313– 15, 396, 442–43, 497. During the course of the War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War, and the American War, the working relationship between the Admiralty and merchants’ associations in England and the West Indies established personal bonds between merchants and naval officers. Thus in 1778, when Admiral Augustus Keppel faced a court-martial for his failure to attack the French fleet with sufficient vigor, he was supported by a group of London merchants whose captured cargoes Keppel had tried to recover from Mediterranean pirates twenty-seven years prior, during the War of Austrian Succession. Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 80, 82. 44. Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer, 121–93. Between 1700 and 1770, English manufacturing for the English market increased by 14 percent, while production for export increased by 156 percent. Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 77. 45. Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer, 299; Brewer, Sinews of Power, 100, 116–19, 121. The unfunded portion of the national debt usually increased during wartime, but then decreased following the war, with the imposition of new indirect taxes on specific consumer goods. 46. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 41, 66; O’Brien, “Fiscal Exceptionalism,” 262. The American customs service, for example, cost the English treasury £2,000 a year when it was established in 1696. By 1763, the customs service operated thirty-eight customs houses along the American coastline, at an annual cost of £7,000. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 8. 47. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 576–77, 581–82; Brewer, Sinews of Power, 41, 96–98. Excise taxes made up the rest of the revenues, bringing in more money—in both relative and absolute terms—than either customs duties or direct taxes. 48. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 92–93. 49. Ibid., 114–15. 50. Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 81. 51. For detailed accounts of the burgeoning commercial, financial, and political bonds between the commercial sector, the Admiralty, and the Treasury, see Bannerman, Merchants and the Military; Kammen, Empire and Interest; Knight and Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet.

4. Smuggling: Armed Commerce and the Severe Limits of State Enforcement and Persuasion 1. Schlegel, Neutral Rights, 47; J. B., A letter to a member of Parliament; Goodrich, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 1478–80; Allen, Our Navy and the West Indian Pirates, 6; Elleman, Forbes, and Rosenberg, Piracy and Maritime Crime, 6; Sullivan, “The Devil’s Brethren,” 296; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 55; Woodbury, Great Days of Piracy, 66. For a discussion of the intersection of smuggling and piracy in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century, see Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders. 2. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 116–19, 121. 3. CSP–Col, 16:562. 4. CSP–Col, 14:510–11, 16:112–14. 5. CSP–Col, 16:323. 6. It was not uncommon to see piracy and smuggling as two elements of a single problem. Similarly, state-sponsored solutions were aimed at “both Pyrates and illegal Traders.” J. B., A letter to a member of Parliament. 7. CSP–Col, 16: vi–vii, xi–xv. 8. Truxes, Defying Empire, 5–7, 94, 173, 176, 201–4; Marsden, Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2:157; Pares, Yankees and Creoles, 128; Pares, Colonial Blockade,

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Notes to Pages 70–72

198–210; Harman, Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 33, 40–42, 47–59; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 22–23; Klooster, Illicit Riches, 228, 240; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 1, 55; Knight and Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, 177–81. Contraband trade at sea, which necessarily involved smuggling, was so common and popular that commerce raiders used it as an approach tactic—approaching a prospective prize as a merchantman seeking a trade. Little, Sea Rover’s Practice, 176. 9. T 1/380/37, Treasury Board Papers and In-Letters, UK National Archives, Kew. 10. This connection was particularly obvious on the American Gulf Coast, where the aptly named Smugglers’ Anchorage was located in the heart of Barataria Bay, the Gulf pirates’ notorious base of operations south of the port of New Orleans. 11. USCSS, 16th Cong., 1st sess., Senate Document 100. 12. USCSS, 18th Cong., 1st sess., House Report 124. 13. See, for example, Cole, “Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling”; Mui and Mui, “ ‘Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling’ Reconsidered.” 14. Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 190–99; Ramsay, English Overseas Trade, 166, 172; Conway, Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe, 251–44; Conway, War, State, and Society, 100–101; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 135–39; Decker, Serious considerations of the several high duties, 7–8; Clarke, Many a Bloody Affray, 12–15; Webb, Coastguard, 3; Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 2–5; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 133; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 93; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 72–73; Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 1:179–80, 182, 211–17, 330–31; Andreas, Smuggler Nation, 13–28. 15. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 275, 288; Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 38–40. 16. Britain, Statutes at Large: From the sixteenth year . . . to the twentieth year of the reign of King George the Third, 13:97; Decker, Serious considerations of the several high duties, 7–8; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 150, 169; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 124–25; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 94–95; Webb, Coastguard, 4; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 32, 38. 17. Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 3–4; Ramsay, English Overseas Trade, 170–72; Benham, Smugglers’ Century, 22. 18. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, 275–76; Ramsay, English Overseas Trade, 172–73; Braddick, Nerves of State, 160–62; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 147–50, 156–57. 19. Customs enforcement suffered during wartime, as revenue vessels and crews were occasionally pressed into service in the Royal Navy, and naval vessels were otherwise occupied and could not be relied on to consistently assist in customs enforcement. Enforcement at port, too, was weakened, since smugglers often played a critical role in meeting the wartime needs of local economies, local governments, various departments of state and the armed forces. 20. Webb, Coastguard, 6; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 42; Clarke, Many a Bloody Affray, 23; Braddick, Nerves of State, 160–62. 21. Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 97, 191–92. 22. Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 2:271, 276–77; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 101–2. 23. Bailyn, New England Merchants, 153; Garitee, The Republic’s Private Navy, 226; Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 11–12; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 145. 24. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 256; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 155–56, 158; Williams, British Commercial Policy, 345–91; Burton, “Vagabonds along the Spanish Louisiana–Texas Frontier,” 452–53. In the eighteenth century, roughly 75 percent of Cuban tobacco production was sold illegally to British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders. McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 155–56, 158. 25. Webb, Coastguard, 6–7; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 101–2.

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26. Bishop, Observations, remarks, and means, to prevent smuggling, 4–5; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 121, 123–24; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 101–2; Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 2:95–134, 231–77; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 168. 27. Clarke, Many a Bloody Affray, 15–17; Webb, Coastguard, 12–13; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 108–13; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 8, 13–14; Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 1:181; Ashworth, “Smugglers and the Birth of Britain’s Consumer Society,” 50. 28. Barrow, Trade and Empire, 97–98, 253–54; Hoon, Organization of the English Customs System, 36–37; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 122–24, 190–91; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 83–86, 270–72, 277; Andreas, Smuggler Nation, 13–28; Benham, Smugglers’ Century, 24–25; Clarke, Many a Bloody Affray, 9–10, 19–21; Webb, Coastguard, 9–10, 12–13; Brewer, Sinews of Power, 66. A brief history of the British customs service can be found in Braddick, Nerves of State, 49–65. The Crown had farmed out the collection of the customs until 1671, when it created the Board of Customs. 29. The customs service had established a Water Guard (1698) and Land Guard (1699) as a first and second line of defense against smugglers. Despite their efforts and enhanced legal authorities, neither was particularly effective in curbing the volume of illegal trade. In 1809 the Preventive Water Guard was established; it was later (in 1817) bolstered by the Kent Coast Blockade. In 1822 the Preventive Water Guard was absorbed by the Customs Board’s newly formed Coastguard, which in 1831 took over blockading duties from the Royal Navy. 30. Hoon, Organization of the English Customs System, 184–86; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 121, 186–88; Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 48, 100; Benham, Smugglers’ Century, 16–17, 25, 31. In the early nineteenth century, Britain and the United States outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. In the half-century that followed, British and American authorities attempted to suppress this newly illegal trade. Indeed, the Royal Navy seized roughly 1,600 slave ships over this period, freeing over 100,000 Africans. Yet contemporaries were very much aware of the persistence of this contraband trade. The Slave Trade Acts of 1818, 1819, and 1820 are evidence of continued frustration by the US Congress over its failure to effectively enforce prohibition. For continued slaving operations after prohibition, see “The Slave Trade,” Charleston Mercury, issue 10434 (January 7, 1859), 1; Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, Exposition of the African slave trade; Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, A view of the present state of the African slave trade; Grenville, Substance of the speech of the Right Honourable Lord Grenville; Thorpe, A view of the present increase of the slave trade; Davis, “Buchanian Espionage”; Eltis, “Fluctuations in Mortality”; Sherwood, After Abolition. 31. Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 106–7; Levitt, For Want of Trade, 18–20; Klooster, Illicit Riches, 145–46; Webb, Coastguard, 12–13; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 7–8, 17, 24–26; Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 1:185–90; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 122–24, 190–91; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 83–86, 270–72, 277; Kammen, Empire and Interest, 117–18; McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 184, 196–201; Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 190–96; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 157–58; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 66; Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 38–40, 101–3. Perhaps the very ineffectiveness and futility of customs enforcement actually encouraged such corruption and collusion among magistrates and customs officers. 32. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 26–27; Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy, 87; Hoon, Organization of the English Customs System, 87–89. 33. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 27–28. 34. Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 1:179; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 48–51, 55, 71–77, 88–89, 129–30; Webb, Coastguard, 13–14. 35. Lydon, Pirates, Privateers, and Profits, 56–58, 122; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 8, 27–28, 41.

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Notes to Pages 75–79

36. Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 5. 37. Banks, Reminiscences of Smugglers, 26–27, 51–66. 38. Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 131–32; Harper, The Smugglers, 30. 39. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 41, 67. 40. Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 124–25; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 41–44; Hoon, Organization of the English Customs System, 185–86; Kammen, Empire and Interest, 117–18; Banks, Reminiscences of Smugglers, 26–27, 51–66; Rogers, Mayhem, 108–29. 41. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 39, 89–90; Braddick, Nerves of State, 37–45; Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 576–77, 581–82; Gould, Persistence of Empire, 163. 42. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 89–90, 100; Hoon, Organization of the English Customs System, 35–36, 86, 212–14; O’Brien, “Political Economy of British Taxation,” 6–7. Some goods, such as tea, coffee and a variety of liquors, were subject to both customs and excise taxes. 43. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 95–100; Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 576–77, 581– 82. Brewer explains that the excise tax was easier—practically and politically—to collect than customs duties and the land tax. Customs duties represented 20–30 percent of total tax revenues during the eighteenth century, with the land tax contributing roughly another 20 percent. Excise made up the remainder of the government’s revenue, bringing in more—in relative and absolute terms—than customs and land taxes combined. 44. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 213; Bishop, Observations, remarks, and means, to prevent smuggling, 3–5, 18; Banks, Reminiscences of Smugglers, 21, 29, 50; Karras, Smuggling, 7, 145n24; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 1–2; Anon., The fair traders objections; Anon., Fair trade, besides the heavy duties it lies under; Post Boy, issue 4854 (September 1–3, 1720); Daily Courant, issue 5887 (September 2, 1720); London Journal, issue 183 (January 26, 1723), 5; Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, February 15, 1724, 2788; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, issue 12,744 (January 4, 1770), 1; Caledonian Mercury, issue 12,288 (June 26, 1800), 1; Daily Courant, issue 5969 (December 8, 1720); Parker’s Penny Post, November 8, 1725, 3; Lloyd’s Evening Post, November 9, 1763, 460; Lloyd’s Evening Post, October 18, 1765, 392; Middlesex Journal, August 14, 1770, 4; London Chronicle, September 23, 1784, 292; Public Advertiser, September 23, 1784, 3. 45. Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 134–35. 46. Daily Post, issue 1365 (February 11, 1724); Daily Courant, issue 6971 (February 24, 1724); Daily Post, issue 1445 (May 14, 1724); Daily Journal, issue 4500 (June 17, 1735); London Evening Post, issue 6618 (April 10, 1770). 47. Read’s Weekly Journal or British-Gazetteer, February 13, 1736, 3; Historical Register, vol. 10 (1725), 287; Historical Register, vol. 18 (1733), 247, 328–29; Public Advertiser, March 12, 1790, 1–2; Grub-Street Journal, February 15, 1732, 2; Edinburgh Advertiser, December 10, 1811, 7; True Briton, September 12, 1798, 2; Daily Courant, December 16, 1732, 1; Country Journal or Craftsman, October 2, 1736, 2; Public Advertiser, March 12, 1790, 1–2. 48. Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, November 20–22, 1755, 3. See also Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, issue 12,744 (January 4, 1770), 1. 49. O’Brien, “Political Economy of British Taxation,” 7. 50. Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 12–13, 89, 94–96, 102, 190–91; Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 23–28. 51. Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees, 1:104; Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 34; Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 179–80; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 83–86, 270–73; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 168; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 120–21, 124–25, 135–37, 190–91; Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 2–3; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 8, 13–14; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 9; Webb, Coastguard, 7. The career of Zephaniah Job serves as an illustration of the respectability of known smugglers. Job’s success as a smuggler enabled him to establish himself also as a privateer, mer-

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chant, banker, estate manager, and contractor for the navy. Knight and Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet, 177–81. 52. Banks, Reminiscences of Smugglers 21; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 169–75; Benham, Smugglers’ Century, 169; Earle, Pirate Wars, 115; Phillips, “Growth and Composition of Trade in the Iberian Empires,” 95; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 120; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 273. 53. Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 2; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 168–69; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 163; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 168; Benham, Smugglers’ Century, 169. 54. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, book 5, 254, 310. 55. Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 1:185–90, 230–31; Benham, Smugglers’ Century, 29; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 132; Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 165; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 93–94, 115–17. In The Scarecrow’s Legion, Hufton and Baird offer numerous examples of the degree to which smuggling and violence toward customs agents were widespread and socially, administratively, and judicially acceptable. It is evident from these sources that the laws that actually governed local communities in Britain and British America were not those enacted and articulated by the central authorities in London. 56. Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 190–96; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 156, 165–67; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 15–17; Conway, War, State, and Society, 100–101; Rogers, Mayhem, 108–29. 57. Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 119–20, 133, 141, 147–48; Magens, Essay on Insurances, 2:363. 58. Banks, Reminiscences of Smugglers, 21–22, 25–28, 31–44, 51–66; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 56–65; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 24–26. 59. Payne, Fishing a Borderless Sea, xv, xxii, 36, 38, 41–42, 45. 60. Braddick, Nerves of State, 18; Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 179–80; Conway, War, State, and Society, 100–101; O’Brien, “Fiscal Exceptionalism,” 251. See also Decker, Serious considerations of the several high duties. 61. For a discussion of conscious efforts to foster legitimacy for the central government and the tax code in the mid-nineteenth century (through tax and political reforms), see Daunton, “Trusting Leviathan.” 62. Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 2; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 168–69; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 163–64, 148–49; Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 168; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 51; Benham, Smugglers’ Century, 169. 63. Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 205. 64. Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 10–11, 15; Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 148–49; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 149, 159. 65. Truxes, Defying Empire, 8; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 7. As discussed earlier in the text, this attitude regarding trade with the enemy and patriotism played itself out in the insurance market too: if British underwriters made a profit by insuring French vessels and cargoes, then they inflicted a proportional loss on the French proprietors that they insured. Such a trade, therefore, should have been continued in times war even more than in peace. Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 410–11. 66. Truxes, Defying Empire, 5, 84, 94; Marsden, Reports of Cases, 165–66, 195; Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 429–30, 452–53; Harman, Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 33, 40–41. 67. Pierce, Tobacco Coast, 350; Pares, Yankees and Creoles, 128; Harman, Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 33, 40–42, 47–59; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 22–23; Truxes, Defying Empire, 174–75, 202; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 36; Gillingham, Marine Insurance in Philadelphia, 67–69; Conway, Britain, Ireland and

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Continental Europe, 248; Morieux, “Diplomacy from Below,” 95–119; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 7, 12–13; Robinson, Reports of Cases, 1:18; Payne, Fishing a Borderless Sea, xv, xxii, 31–33, 36, 38, 41–42, 45; Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 279–95; Galvin, Patterns of Pillage, 38. As illustrated in chapter 2, such attitudes regarding unrestricted commerce and the primacy of local jurisdiction and custom over central authority and law were widespread in European and colonial trading communities. 68. Smith, Borderland Smuggling, x, xiii; Truxes, Defying Empire, 200; Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 148–49; Kert, Trimming Yankee Sails, 36–39. 69. Cunningham and Greg, Letterbook, 34; Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees, 1:104; Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 179–80; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 270–73; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 120–21, 124–25, 135–37, 190–91. 70. Ramsay, English Overseas Trade, 236; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 158–59; Gillingham, Marine Insurance in Philadelphia, 67–69; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 141–44; Earle, Pirate Wars, 115; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 12. 71. Indeed, the de facto policy of salutary neglect in British America—characterized by, among other things, lax customs enforcement during wartime and peace—was beneficial for colonial economies. Piratical trade and smuggling cut into the King’s revenues and increased the Treasury’s military expenditures (in wars against armies and navies supplied by colonial subjects), but they created markets for colonial goods, brought cheap imports into local communities in America, and expanded the scope of commercial activity overall in the colonies. Truxes, Defying Empire, 173, 176, 201–4. 72. Truxes, Defying Empire, 6, 106–9; Koot, Empire at the Periphery, 7, 12–13. 73. Truxes, Defying Empire, 6, 157. 74. Robinson, Reports of Cases, 1:18; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 130; Morieux, “Diplomacy from Below,” 95–119; Conway, Britain, Ireland and Continental Europe, 258; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 8, 53–54; Webb, Coastguard, 4; Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 279–95. 75. Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 153–59; Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 190– 96; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 53–54; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 156– 57. One study suggests the same of British pirates. Fox, “Jacobitism and the ‘Golden Age’ of Piracy,” 282, 287–88, 294–96. There is certainly evidence that Jacobite dissidence was connected with small- and large-scale smuggling and other types of criminal activity. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 111–17. 76. Smugglers and local constituents in rural and coastal areas were not wrong in regarding customs agents and customs houses as tools of centralization in the hands of the central government. As John Brewer’s research demonstrates, the revenue departments did expand dramatically in the century that followed the Glorious Revolution. Moreover customs houses were used to manipulate local elections. Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 162. 77. Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 158–59; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 29. 78. Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 161–62. Monod’s Jacobitism and the English People illustrates just how widespread Jacobitism was. And just as smuggling and smugglers benefited from the association with Jacobite political critique of governmental power, so the Jacobite cause benefited from the secret and reliable services offered by smugglers. From 1688 on, local smugglers in the south of England transported Jacobite agents and correspondence to and from England (for a price, of course; smuggling Jacobite agents, intelligence, and propaganda was part and parcel of their illegal and lucrative business). Admiral Edward Vernon gave voice to this concern in 1745, when addressing the threat of a French invasion: “Smuggling has converted those employed in it . . . to dangerous spies on all our proceedings for the enemy’s daily information.” Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 159–60, 163–64, 167 (quot.).

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79. Paul Monod explains that smuggling was “characterized as much by broad-based collaboration as by self-interested individualism. It was not a form of class conflict. Although they abominated Whig government, the Jacobite gentry were firm upholders of the social order. The organized smuggling they sponsored emerged out of paternalism, hierarchy, and community, not in opposition to them. This explains why the commercial growth of the contraband trade was not accompanied by a severe disruption of the existing patterns of provincial life. Smuggling did not undermine the authority of the gentry because they actively promoted it. In many ways, it actually strengthened their aura of social preeminence; it was their protection that allowed new commercial strategies to succeed, their tastes for tea and brandy that were so avidly copied by the middling and lower classes. Through them, forsaken corners of the land entered the expanding web of national commerce.” Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 168. See also Rogers, Mayhem, 108–29. 80. Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 15–16; for a brief description of the Board of Trade’s history and responsibilities see 13–14. 81. In America, customs evasion and trading with the enemy continued along their traditional course after independence was achieved. In the 1790s, during the Quasi-War against France, such illegal trade with the French was intertwined with Republican opposition to President John Adams. During President Jefferson’s famous embargo and the War of 1812, illegal trade with Canada was linked to Federalist opposition to Jefferson and to “Madison’s war.” More than opposition to a particular governing elite, illegal trade reflected Americans’ attachment to unregulated trade. 82. Smugglers harkened to an archaic framework of state. “Free trade” was an ideological defense of established practices against the innovations of the tax state, just as Grotius’s framework of free seas was a response to the novelty of closed trade zones imposed by mercantilist empires. In “Violent Undertows,” Eric Tagliacozzo demonstrates that smuggling in Southeast Asia also represented a sincere ideological opposition to state-building. As a commercial enterprise that reflected earlier trade practices and political attitudes, it challenged the legitimacy of new regimes. Tagliacozzo, “Violent Undertows,” 118–31. 83. Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 119–20, 128–29, 132–33, 142–44, 147–48; Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 158–59, 181–82; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 6, 10–12, 17–19, 21–22; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 1, 39, 42–44, 55; Benham, Smugglers’ Century, 15–18; Webb, Coastguard, 7–10; Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 12; Barrow, Trade and Empire, 253; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 93, 205; Banks, Reminiscences of Smugglers, 25–27, 51–54, 56–66; Hoon, Organization of the English Customs System, 185–86; Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 1:184, 196–97; Karras, Smuggling, 5, 7–8; Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 148–49; Truxes, Defying Empire, 6–7; Hill, Liberty against the Law, 111–13; Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 168. In 1692, customs officers captured a contraband cargo (imported from Calais), which belonged to the mayor of Hythe, Julius Deeds. Deeds responded by sending a group of servants and clients (including the local constable) to attack the customs agents and liberate his cargo. At his trial the local jury sided with the mayor. Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 10. 84. Atton and Holland, The King’s Customs, 1:186. 85. Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 106–7, 134; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 17. 86. Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 37–40; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 128–29, 140–44; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 42–44. 87. Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 137–40, quot. on 139; Hoon, Organization of the English Customs System, 185–86. 88. Monod, “Dangerous Merchandise,” 168; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 275; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 41–42, 51. 89. O’Brien, “Political Economy of British Taxation,” 24–25; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 93; Banks, Reminiscences of Smugglers, 16, 25; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 14–15;

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Webb, Coastguard, 3, 5, 7–8; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 130, 154; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 8–20; Pérotin-Dumon, “The Pirate and the Emperor,” 33–34. 90. National authorities recognized that along the coasts, everyone was involved in and supportive of smuggling, that local juries would acquit smugglers and convict revenue officers, and that smuggling was viewed as a legitimate and conventional form of commerce, while enforcement of customs duties was perceived as unfair and tyrannical. This recognition might explain the pedagogical tone of Parliamentary legislation and royal edicts against smuggling. 91. Country Journal or Craftsman, October 2, 1736, 2; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 140–41. 92. Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 179–80; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 24–26; Webb, Coastguard, 21. 93. Harper, The Smugglers, 242–44. 94. Chester, Chronicles of the Customs Department, 51; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 204. 95. Banks, Reminiscences of Smugglers, 5; Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 204, 221; Harper, The Smugglers, 12–14; Cole, “Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling,” 395; Bowen, Ships for All, 216; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 28; Black, British Seaborne Empire, 193; Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 144, 147; Ramsay, English Overseas Trade, 166–67, 173, 175. 96. Williams, Contraband Cargoes, 96–97. 97. Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” 134; Hufton and Baird, The Scarecrow’s Legion, 37. 98. Ashworth, “Smugglers and the Birth of Britain’s Consumer Society,” 53; Clark, Many a Bloody Affray, 22–23; Mui and Mui, “William Pitt and the Enforcement of the Commutation Act,” 447. 99. For a local case study of wartime conditions invigorating both piracy and smuggling (in Saint Malo, in Brittany), see Bromley, Corsairs and Navies, 279–95. 100. Revenues from a new form of taxation—on income—provided the Treasury with an alternate revenue stream, with the reduction or elimination of customs duties. An income tax was introduced in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, but abolished soon after the fall of Napoleon. It was reintroduced in 1842. 101. For a discussion of the limits and ambiguities of Britain’s free-trade policies see Price, British Society, 89–122.

Conclusion 1. Hillman and Gathmann, “Overseas Trade and the Decline of Privateering,” 731–33, 740–43; Starkey, “A Restless Spirit,” 137–39; Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees, 1:21–22. 2. Hillman and Gathmann, “Overseas Trade and the Decline of Privateering,” 743–47. These percentages have to be understood in the context of a growing merchant fleet—9 percent still represented a large number of active privateers in the 1810s—but the trend points to changing economic incentives against freebooting. 3. Ibid., 731–33, 740–43, 747–49. Indeed, Hillman and Gathmann demonstrate that British overseas trade expanded much more rapidly and consistently than French, Spanish, and Dutch trade from the late eighteenth century on. Thus privateering targets remained relatively stable, while commercial opportunities in overseas markets grew steadily. 4. Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 348–49. 5. In State Formation in Early Modern England, Braddick observes that political power normally commands compliance not because of the threat of force, but because of genuine recognition of the essential legitimacy of the governing authority (9). The parameters he uses to measure legitimacy—legal validity, evidence of consent, and the beliefs and

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values of constituents (69)—indicate a strong deficit in legitimacy for the regulatory functions carried out by the central government at sea and port (trade regulation and customs enforcement). 6. Social status empowered English officeholders as much as formal powers. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 82–84. Local gentry and other local magistrates and constables wielded political power in the context of a broader social role among their constituents. Meanwhile, a nameless and faceless institutional government in London did not enjoy the legitimacy conferred by communal and familial bonds, and its local agents did not possess the status and informal power wielded by more traditional local authority figures. 7. Hobsbawm, Bandits; Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels; Thompson, “Moral Economy of the English Crowd”; Hill, Liberty against the Law; White, “Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border.” 8. “Social bandits” have traditionally been presented as resisting the profit-oriented practices introduced through the advance of market capitalism. Yet the popular support and legitimacy enjoyed by smugglers, wreckers, and pirates indicate an attachment to custom, rather than resistance to unregulated and free trade. These social bandits and their many collaborators, in fact, explicitly championed the inherited custom of unregulated maritime trade. For a critique of the association of social crime with resistance to capitalism, see Innes and Styles, “The Crime Wave,” 396–98. 9. Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” 49–52; Greene, Peripheries and Center (1990), xi. 10. Benton, “Toward a New Legal History of Piracy,” 239. 11. Hanna, “The Pirate Nest,” 229–30. 12. Studies such as Conway’s Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century point to a historiographical habit of projecting nineteenth- and twentieth-century national identities and nationalist sensibilities onto eighteenth-century populations. Similarly, the authority and legitimacy that statutory law enjoys in the modern era is projected back onto the eighteenth century, along with modern notions of nationhood, national allegiance, and state authority. 13. This was not necessarily a feature of a premodern political or legal mentality. In modern societies, as well, many laws that have been legally enacted are not enforced because they have ceased to reflect the moral or legal beliefs of constituents. 14. Piggot, The Declaration of Paris, 143–45. In the American Civil War, the United States did not authorize commerce raiding with privateering commissions. Like the British and French governments, the Union, for the first time, found itself in a position of preponderant naval advantage over its enemy. The Confederate States of America, however, did issue letters of marque to its citizens. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, 76. 15. Maritime League for the Restoration of Naval Rights by Great Britain, The Declaration of Paris, 1–2; Maritime League for the Restoration of Naval Rights by Great Britain, The Declaration of Paris: Correspondence with Lord Cowley, 1; Bowles, The Declaration of Paris of 1856, vi–vii; Ritchie, “Government Measures,” 24. Proponents of privateering as a legitimate and effective form of naval war advocated, in fact, using the steam-powered ships of the merchant marine as privateers against enemy commerce, still carried out primarily on ships of sail. Maritime League for the Restoration of Naval Rights by Great Britain, The Declaration of Paris, 4–5.

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Index

Declaration of Paris, 32, 98–99

Admiralty, 14, 15, 23, 31, 58, 60–63, 65, 69, 75, 78, 106n34, 119n92, 119n100, 123n43, 123n51 Admiralty courts, xii, 10, 15, 29, 45, 47, 48, 75, 97, 118n82, 119n92, 119n100. See also prize courts

East India Company, British, 55–56, 69, 78–79, 90, 109n99; Dutch, 42, 55–56 Fletcher, Benjamin, 47, 50, 68–69 free trade, 4, 82, 85–86, 89–91, 93, 96, 105n28, 129n82, 130n100, 130n101, 131n8. See also capitalism frontier, Atlantic, xi–xii, 3, 6–7, 9, 38, 66, 92, 94–96

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Beeston, William, 22 Belcher, Jonathan, 14 Bellomont, Lord (Richard Coote), 9, 46–47, 68–69, 115n51 Benton, Lauren, 109n91, 113n31 Board of Trade, xi, 22, 23, 36, 46, 49, 74, 78, 83, 86, 129n80 borderlands. See frontier, Atlantic Byrd, William, 14, 19 capitalism, 99, 131n8. See also free trade centralization. See state formation Coastguard, 61, 65, 73, 81, 90, 114n41, 125n29. See also guarda costas Colley, Linda, xv, 4, 30 common law. See law, ideologies of convoys, 13, 15, 16, 38, 51, 55–59, 61, 64–65, 77, 78, 82, 94, 121n15, 121n16 Cookson, J. E., 31, 113n31 Coote, Richard, Lord Bellomont. See Bellomont, Lord (Richard Coote) customs, xi, 15, 17, 38, 39, 41, 46, 47, 55, 62, 63, 67–93, 115n49, 123n46, 123n47, 124n19, 125n28, 125n29, 125n31, 126n42, 126n43, 127n55, 128n71, 128n76, 129n81, 129n83, 130n90, 130n100, 131n5. See also taxation

Gould, Eliga, 113n31 guarda costas, 41, 110n106, 117n69. See also Coast Guard Greene, Jack, xv, xvi, 30, 32, 53, 111n16, 113n31 Grotius, Hugo, 34, 112n25, 129n82 Harding, Christopher, 33, 113n31 Harding, Richard, 20 Hay, Douglas, 95 Henretta, James, 30 Hill, Christopher, 32, 95 Hobsbawm, Eric, 95 import tax. See customs insurance, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, 8, 10–14, 24, 37, 40, 45, 51–65, 77, 83, 92–94, 103n8, 104n10, 104n12, 104n14, 104n18, 104n19, 104n20, , 105n24, 105n25, 105n27, 105n28, 106n37, 109n104, 118n89, 120n1, 122n32, 122n35, 122n37, 127n65

155

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156

Index

Jacobitism, 84–86, 128n57, 128n78, 129n79 law, ideologies of, xii, 3, 5–6, 9–10, 22–23, 25–30, 32–37, 40, 42–43, 45, 47–50, 52, 64, 65–67, 72, 75, 77–79, 81, 85–86, 88, 92–93, 95–98, 102n14, 106n34, 109n91, 113n27, 113n28, 113n31, 119n99, 119n100, 131n12. See also localism law enforcement. See policing, maritime letters of marque, 5, 15, 24, 43, 45, 48, 69, 102n11, 102n13, 102n15, 114n43, 115n49, 116n67, 131n14. See also privateering Lloyd’s, 14, 56, 58, 60, 61 localism, xii, 4–7, 23, 25, 28–35, 43–49, 52–54, 68, 72–89, 92–99, 110n114, 111n15, 111n16, 111n18, 112n20, 112n21, 113n31, 114n41, 118n83, 127n55, 128n67, 128n71, 128n76, 129n83, 130n90, 131n6. See also law, ideologies of; salutary neglect London Assurance Company, 11, 56, 58–59

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Markham, William, 44, 47 Martens, Georg Friedrich de, 50 mercantilism, 23, 54, 69, 71, 74, 79, 86, 91, 96, 109n104, 127n65, 129n82. See also customs; Navigation Acts naval escorts. See convoys Navigation Acts, 23, 69, 74, 79, 83, 91. See also customs; mercantilism Navy, Royal, xi, xiii, xiv, 2, 4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 18–22, 47, 48, 51, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61–2, 64–65, 73–75, 78, 80, 82, 83, 89, 106n45, 108n77, 123n43, 124n19, 125n29, 125n30, 127n51 Navy, US, 16–19, 60–61, 108n87, 131n14 Nicholson, Francis, 69 pardons, 17, 21–22, 42, 43, 45, 48–49, 72, 102n13, 108n85, 108n87, 116n67 Pérotin–Dumon, Anne, 7, 23–24, 103n16 Phips, William, 46 piracy: decline of, 2–3, 7, 14, 66, 68, 93–94, 99, 102n15, 105n27, 105n28; and public opinion, xii, 3–4, 5–8, 10–11, 22–26, 28, 32–38, 40–54, 59, 64–67, 79, 81–82, 84, 86, 88, 92–96, 98–99,

102n14, 113n31, 114n41, 117n68, 118n86, 127n55, 127n65, 128n67, 130n5, 131n8, 131n12, 131n15; and smuggling, 3–6, 10, 24–25, 32, 35, 38, 43, 46, 50, 52–53, 65–70, 75–79, 81, 84, 86, 88, 90, 93, 95–96, 102n14, 111n18, 115n49, 123n1, 123n6, 126n51, 128n71, 130n99 policing, maritime, xi, 7–10, 14, 17–23, 25, 32, 35, 37, 39–43, 45, 47–49, 54, 57–61, 64–81, 83–84, 86–90, 93–98, 101n1, 110n106, 113n28, 119n99, 119n100, 124n19, 125n29, 125n30, 125n31, 128n71, 129n83, 130n90, 131n5. See also convoys; customs; pardons; right of visit Pompey, 1, 21, 101n1 Preventive Water Guard. See Coastguard privateering, xii, xiii, xvi, 3–8, 10, 16–46, 48–59, 61, 63–65, 67, 69, 74, 75, 79, 82, 92–94, 96, 98, 99, 101n6, 102n11, 102n15, 103n9, 105n24, 105n28, 106n37, 109n98, 110n106, 110n2, 114n34, 114n43, 115n51, 116n63, 116n68, 117n69, 118n82, 118n83, 118n84, 119n90, 120n4, 120n8, 121n13, 121n16, 126n51, 130n2, 130n3, 131n14, 131n15; similarity to piracy, xiii, 1, 5–7, 10, 15, 18, 22–25, 27–29, 33–43, 46–52, 79, 92, 96–97, 102n13, 102n15, 110n2, 115n49, 115n51, 116n67, 116n68, 117n68, 117n69 prize courts, xii, 28–29, 38–40, 45, 50, 57, 75, 84, 116n62, 116n63, 118n82. See also Admiralty courts Randolph, Edward, 9, 46–47, 119n95 Rediker, Marcus, xv, 8, 9, 108n80 Revenue cutters. See Coastguard right of visit, 19, 107n68. See also policing, maritime Ritchie, Robert, xv, 8, 9, 27, 28 Roberts, Bartholomew (Black Bart), 20–21 Royal Exchange Assurance, 11, 56 salutary neglect, 30, 31, 86, 128n71. See also law, ideologies of; localism Schlegel, Johan F. W., 116n68 slave trade, xiii, 1, 2, 36, 53, 68, 110n105, 125n30 Smith, Adam, 80 smuggling, 3–6, 10–12, 20, 23–25, 30, 32, 35, 37, 38, 43, 46, 50, 52, 53, 64, 65,

The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,

Index

tariffs. See customs taxation, 3, 10, 24, 35, 53, 56, 62–64, 67, 71–73, 76–78, 81, 85, 89–91, 123n45, 123n47, 126n42, 126n43, 127n61, 129n82, 130n100. See also customs Teach, Edward (Blackbeard), 20–21 Thompson, E. P., 95 Thoreau, Henry David, vii, 66, 92 Walpole, Robert, 85 White, Richard, 95 wrecking, 24–26, 32, 35, 43, 58, 60, 95–96, 110n113, 110n114, 114n41, 120n4, 122n32, 131n8

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66–91, 93, 95–97, 102n14, 110n106, 111n18, 115n49, 123n1, 123n6, 124n8, 124n10, 124n19, 125n29, 125n30, 126n51, 127n55, 128n71, 128n75, 128n76, 128n78, 129n79, 129n81, 129n82, 129n83, 130n90, 130n99, 131n8; and political opposition, 3, 81, 84–86, 128n57, 128n78, 129n79, 129n81, 129n82 Starkey, David, xv, 27, 110n2 state formation, 4, 6–7, 23, 28, 30–32, 40, 77–79, 84–85, 96–99, 102n14, 103n16, 103n17, 111n4, 111n16, 128n76, 129n82, 130n5, 131n6

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The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,

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Guy Chet was raised in Ness Ziona, Israel. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Haifa, and an MA and PhD at Yale University. He lives in Plano, Texas, and serves as associate professor of early American and military history at the University of North Texas. His first book, Conquering the American Wilderness, is a study of English and American military culture. Addressing narratives of American exceptionalism, it points to trends of cultural continuity between the Old World and the New. This theme of transatlantic cultural cohesion is at the heart of The Ocean Is a Wilderness. Although he is a specialist in early modern history, Chet’s first love was and still is Roman history.

The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,

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The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,

Copyright © 2014. University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved. The Ocean Is a Wilderness : Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority, 1688-1856, University of Massachusetts Press,