While piracy has been and, in some parts of the world, continues to be a threat to merchants at sea, what we think of as piracy begins as many of the world’s old empires were getting started. With the New World discovered in the Americas, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Portugal rushed to lay claim on its lands and resources. Oftentimes, these world powers fought each other for resources and engaged private citizens to help with this “resource reallocation.” In time, once there was no further use for the Crown to sanction their actions, these private sailors when rogue.
The first thing to note is that what separated a pirate from a privateer was a contract from the Crown. Privateers were commissioned by the British government to raid Spanish and French ships for gold, crops, and other precious resources. A privateer was essentially a “pirate with a license”, though to the opposing governments of the world, they were still pirates. Privateers began to operate for the United Kingdom as early as the 16th Century. One of the most famous of these privateers, Francis Drake, received his commission from Queen Elizabeth I in 1572 and used it to rob Spanish settlements in the Americas. In doing so, he gained much favor with the queen.
It was also as early as this time that the lines between privateer and pirate began to blur. Some sailors chose the life of a privateer crewman because it was far more lucrative than service in the Royal Navy. Additionally, privateers were known to go beyond their commissions and attack merchant ships that didn’t belong to France, Spain, or whatever nation their commission allowed them to attack. In other cases, pirates that stuck to attacking ships that weren’t from the United Kingdom were given a blind eye from Her Majesty’s Government.
By the mid-17th Century, Spain was on the decline as a power in the Americas, but still maintained a strong presence. France had been gone for some time, consumed by its own internal strife, but it came back to establish itself as one of the leading powers in the Caribbean along with the British and the Dutch. Without a need to raid Spanish ships and cripple their colonial efforts, the British government cut loose many of the privateers it had employed. Many of these former British privateers opted to continue their ways without leave from the Crown. Pirates such as “Calico” Jack Rackham, Sir Henry Morgan, William Kidd, Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts, Anne Bonny, and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach became notorious names in the New World.
Fortunes changed for the pirates after they began targeting slave ships bringing captured Africans to the colonies. In some cases, pirates freed the slaves and offered them an option to join their ranks. In others, the pirates captured the slaves for themselves to ransom them or sell them. British slave traders urged the government to crackdown. Parliament expanded the Royal Navy and created a system of courts for the Vice-Admiralty to charge suspected pirates there in the Caribbean colonies rather than having to bring them back to the United Kingdom. The government even offered pardons to some while the larger military presence either finished the rest or drove them to other parts of the world.
By the time of the Declaration of Paris in 1856, privateering had been outlawed as a means of engaging another nation, and pirates all but wiped out in the Americas. As the United States and Mexico became powers in their own right and grew their own navies, pirate activity in North and Central America ceased altogether.
