Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740

Pirate Nests

Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740

Mark G. Hanna

Published for the

Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture,

Williamsburg, Virginia,

by the

University of North Carolina Press,

Chapel Hill

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg

Foundation. On November 15, 1996, the Institute adopted the present name

in honor of a bequest from Malvern H. Omohundro, Jr.

© 2015 The University of North Carolina Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanna, Mark G., 1974– author.

Pirate nests and the rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 / by Mark G. Hanna.

pages cm

"Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American

History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-1794-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4696-1795-4 (ebook)

1. Piracy—Great Britain—History. 2. Piracy—Great Britain—

Colonies—History. 3. Pirates—Great Britain—History. 4. Great Britain—

History—Stuarts, 1603–1714. I. Title.

DA16.H25 2015

910.4′5—dc23

2015022645

19 18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgments

In 2008, I presented an admittedly sweeping paper on piracy trials in the American colonies at Harvard’s three-week International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World. When I was done, Bernard Bailyn asked me (while laughing) whether I thought piracy explained the entire rise of the British Empire. I cheekily responded, Yes. He immediately countered, Not a chance. I took this as a call to arms. Such an endeavor required a great deal of intellectual, emotional, and financial help.

As my undergraduate thesis advisor at Yale, John Demos was and has been my idea of a model historian. He taught me that a historian’s greatest attribute is empathy, even with pirates and their supporters. I am obliged to my three primary dissertation advisors in Harvard’s History of American Civilization Program. Having raised five children before she entered academia, Laurel Ulrich is uniquely attuned to her students as people, not merely as scholars. As a fellow sailor, Joyce Chaplin was instrumental in helping frame my work in a global context. Jill Lepore counts among the historical profession’s most brilliant natural writers, and served as my original dissertation copy-editor. This committee willingly oversaw what was an ambitious dissertation that took on a huge range of disciplines. I am sincerely grateful for their patience, open-mindedness, and inspiration.

While I was writing my dissertation and then this book, many friends and colleagues read parts along the way, providing me support and feedback. At Harvard, I would like to thank those in both the History of American Civilization program and History and Literature who helped me with parts of the book: Noam Maggor, Rebekah Maggor, George Blaustein, Michael Kimmage, Katherine Stevens, Peter Becker, Ann Marie Wilson, Lauren Brandt, Diana Williams, Erin Royston Battat, Jeanne Follansbee, and Amy Spellacy. Many Harvard faculty members gave me advice along the way but I should note specifically Morton Horwitz, Steve Biel, Lawrence Buell, Bruce Mann, and Vincent Brown. I worked with a tight-knit cohort of early Americanists, namely Phil Mead, Eliza Clark, Sharon Sundue, John O’Keefe, Paul Mapp, Sarah Pearsall, Michelle Morris, Judy Kertész, Linzy Brekke Aloise, Becky Goetz, James Fichter, Sara Schwebel, Travis Glasson, Heather Kopelson, Rick Bell, Kate Grandjean, Margot Minardi, Katherine Stebbins McCaffrey, Sarah Carter, and Lin Fisher. Special recognition goes to Brian Delay, who, along with Laurel, first suggested that three pages on the captivity of Rhode Island patriarch William Harris at the hands of Algierian corsairs should be the seed for an entire dissertation.

My first true immersion into the Anglophone Atlantic as a graduate student took place at the John Carter Brown Library, thanks to the guidance and support of Director Norman Fiering. There, I received the inspiration and advise of scholars like David Harris Sacks, Neil Safier, Mary Malloy, James Muldoon, Michael LaCombe, Seth Rockman, Jack Greene, and Amy Bushnell. I am grateful for fellowships and essential financial assistance as a graduate student from the Raoul Berger–Mark DeWolfe Howe Fellowship at Harvard Law School (twice), the Artemas Ward Fellowship, the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, and grants from the Charles Warren Center and History of American Civilization program, all at Harvard. I also received a grant from the Donald Groves Fund at the American Numismatic Society, and I have included an image of their Pine Tree Shilling in the book. Since I began my career at the University of California, San Diego, in 2007, I have been fortunate to receive a number of awards and fellowships that have allowed me to research and write this book, particularly in London, including a William Nelson Cromwell Fellowship from the American Society for Legal History and an Arthur H. Cole Grant from the Economic History Association. UCSD provides outstanding resources for junior faculty research, and I am thankful to have been awarded a Hellman Faculty Fellowship, a Faculty Career Development Grant, three Academic Senate travel grants for research in London, as well as grants from the Center for the Humanities.

The Huntington Library has been my intellectual home since I moved to Southern California, and I have been privileged to spend two entire summers on fellowships, first as a graduate student and later as a faculty member at UCSD. Reading and researching during the day, I returned to the idyllic bungalow behind Suzy Moser’s San Marino house to write in the evenings. I still visit whenever I have the opportunity, not just to work, but also to reunite with friends and colleagues. At the Huntington, I have always appreciated the support of Steve Hindle, Director of Research. There, I discussed my work with dozens of scholars in varying stages of their careers, particularly Lindsay O’Neill, Kariann Yokota, Terri Snyder, Katie Paugh, Abby Swingen, and Adrian Funicane. Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas have both given me tremendous feedback, and they provided me the opportunity to present the fourth chapter at USC’s American Origins Seminar. The greatest influence on my work at the Huntington originates from its recently retired director and a wonderful longtime friend, Roy Ritchie. His presence is fairly obvious throughout the book.

I have presented my work in dozens of venues, but I want to specifically thank Phil Morgan for inviting me to present the fifth chapter at the seminar for the History Department of Johns Hopkins. I have also truly enjoyed the feedback on multiple chapters from members of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute here at UCSD. I have never presented before a more engaged and enthusiastic group of scholars.

This manuscript transformed from a dissertation on the support of piracy in Charles Town, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island, to a narrative about the rise of the British Empire while I was on a two-year National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture from 2008 to 2010. In Williamsburg, Ron Hoffman and Sally Mason treated me like their son over the course of my two years. They even caught me in my office at 9:00 at night on my birthday and took me out to dinner. I hope they have forgiven us for raiding the liquor cabinet in their colonial kitchen when guest speakers were in town. Among those I worked with while residing in Virginia, I would like to thank Chris Grasso, Karin Wulf, Brett Rushforth, Mendy Gladden, David S. Shields, Christopher Leslie Brown, Kim Foley, Paul Musselwhite, James Horn, Nick Popper, Fabricio Prado, Zara Anishanslin, Jim Axtell, Celine Carayon, Kris Lane, Lorena Walsh, Susan Kern, Jim Allegro, and Amanda Herbert. My copy-editor at the Institute, Kathy Burdette, has been diligent yet thankfully patient with me. Her kindness stems perhaps from the fact that I always booked all of us dinner at the finest restaurants when we traveled to the Institute’s Annual Conference. In particular, I would like to thank Rob Parkinson and Jonathan Eacott, compatriot fellows, not only for their scholarly engagement with my project but also for their good humor during slogs of writing late into the night. This is one of the last books that legendary editor Fredrika Teute will see from acquisition to publication. She has refused any public tributes for her retirement so in many ways this book is dedicated to her and the monumental contribution she has made to early American scholarship.

I could not imagine a more congenial and supportive work environment than that of the history department at UCSD. This starts at the top with my most recent chairs, Pamela Radcliff and Dave Gutiérrez. My greatest champion at the university was the chair who hired me, John Marino. With his recent passing, UCSD lost its most vocal defender for the importance of the humanities to a liberal arts education. My whole department has supported me since I arrived on campus, but I should note a few who read chapters or helped me with specific aspects of the book: Rebecca Plant, Jessica Graham, Paul Pickowicz, Jeremy Prestholdt, Sarah Schneewind, Eric Van Young, Bob Westman, Ed Watts, Ev Meade, Danny Widener, and my former dean, Seth Lerer. I need to give special recognition to Rachel Klein, who has taken my career and personal well-being as a special mission since we first spoke on the phone to set up an AHA interview.

This book was crafted in many ways out of a course I first taught at Harvard, The Golden Age of Piracy, then similar classes at the College of William and Mary and finally at UCSD. Students in my UCSD course read many of the primary source documents I explore in this book, and I find new and surprising observations from their papers every year. A few undergraduate and graduate students have either read chapters or performed research for this project, namely Emily Whittemore, Hanah Yendler, John Alaniz, and Ruthann Mowry, and political scientists Ryan Jablonski and Steven Oliver. Students in my pirates course work with primary sources from the period because many of them are housed in the Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages in UCSD’s Special Collections Library, where I have served as honorary curator for the last few years. Overseeing these hoards of students is a dedicated staff led by my wonderful friend Lynda Claassen.

I was not trained as a maritime historian. Indeed, most of the pirates in this book are on land. However, the most significant shipboard experience of my life was serving as speaker and common seaman for three weeks at sail aboard the S.V. Corwith Cramer. I think the Sea Education Association has no idea how many scholars it has trained over the years, including Joyce Chaplin, Danny Vickers, and Michael Jarvis. As part of a watch, Captain Virginia Land seemed to find me most suitable for the least desirable tasks, like furling the topsails. For this, I am truly appreciative. My second great maritime influence has been working with Ray Ashley, director of the Maritime Museum of San Diego, who team-teaches a course with me called The Age of Sail, in which all the students perform sail handling. I was honored when Ray named me the museum’s Bob and Laura Kyle Endowed Chair of Maritime History.

Many people have taken a role in the production of this book, but no one has been more involved at both a micro and macro level over the years than Elizabeth Mancke. She has been an active reader over multiple permutations and drafts, providing brilliant insights and sharp criticisms along the way. You can learn more from Elizabeth over one dinner (albeit a two-hour dinner) than in an entire seminar. After being called a cultural historian, a legal historian, or a maritime historian for years, I found it was only when she insisted I was a political historian that the project seemed to come together.

I am deeply grateful to my always-supportive family. I thank my father Rusty for inspiring my love of history, my mother Sue for instilling my love of writing, and my brother Alex for encouraging me to think in new and unusual ways. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Dana Velasco Murillo, whose love and support shepherded me through both tenure and the completion of a book manuscript.

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION William Penn’s Piratical Society

1 / The Elizabethan West Country

Nursery for English Seamen … and Pirates, 1570–1603

2 / Piratical Colonization, 1603–1655

3 / Contesting Jamaica’s Future, 1655–1688

4 / South Sea Pirates Sail North, 1674–1688

5 / The Rise of the Red Sea Pirates, 1688–1696

6 / The Spirit of 1696

Initiating Imperial Revolution

7 / Setting up for Themselves, 1697–1701

8 / George Larkin’s Tour, 1701–1703

9 / Captain Quelch’s Warning

The Transformation of Pirate Nests, 1704–1713

10 / Abandon’d Wretches,

Rethinking the War on Pirates, 1713–1740

CONCLUSION Piratical Societies

Trends and Lessons

Index

Illustrations

Maps

Map 1. England’s West Country, 23

Map 2. Africa, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, 60

Map 3. North America and the Caribbean, 84

Map 4. North American British Colonies, 147

Map 5. The Island of Bermudos, Divided into Its Tribes, with the Castles, Forts, Etc., 321

Map 6. The Town of Boston in New England, 331

Plates

Plate 1. Queen Elizabeth I, 20

Plate 2. Sir Julius Caesar, 26

Plate 3. Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, 71

Plate 4. Pine Tree Shilling, 97

Plate 5. Frontispiece, Sir Francis Drake Revived, 100

Plate 6. The Spanish Armada Destroyed by Captaine Morgan, 114

Plate 7. Sr. Henry Morgan, 124

Plate 8. Cover page, Bucaniers of America, 140

Plate 9. The Cruelty of Lolonois, 164

Plate 10. Cover page, The Voyages and Adventures of Capt. Barth. Sharp and Others, 168

Plate 11. Capt. Avery [Every] and His Crew Taking One of the Great Mogul’s Ships, 191

Plate 12. Frontispiece, Eben-ezer; or, A Small Monument of Great Mercy, 207

Plate 13. Cover page, The Tryals of Joseph Dawson, 241

Plate 14. Cotton Mather, 253

Plate 15. Cover page, A Full Account of the Proceedings in relation to Captain Kidd, 299

Plate 16. Joseph Dudley, 305

Plate 17. Mace of the Marshal in Admiralty, Boston, 332

Plate 18. Capt. Edward Low, in the Hurricane Which He and All the Crew Had Like to Perish’d, 375

Plate 19. Captain Teach Commonly Call’d Black Beard, 379

Plate 20. Cover page, The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton, 395

Plate 21. Cover page, A General History of the Pyrates, from Their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, to the Present Time, 399

Plate 22. Anne Bonny and Mary Read, 404

Abbreviations

ADM Admiralty Office Papers, British National Archives, Kew APC John Roche Dasent et al., eds., Acts of the Privy Council of England, N.S., 46 vols. (London, 1890–1964) APC: Col. Great Britain, Public Record Office, Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series, ed. W. L. Grant and James Munro, 6 vols. (1908; rpt. London, 1966): I, 1613–1680, II, 1680–1720, III, 1720–1745, IV, 1745–1766, V, 1766–1783, VI, The Unbound Papers BL, Add. MSS Additional Manuscripts, British Library, London BOT Board of Trade CO Colonial Office, National Archives, Kew CSP: Col. Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury et al. (London, 1860–1934): America and West Indies, I, 1574–1660, V, 1661–1668, VII, 1669–1674, IX, 1675–1676, also Addenda, 1574–1674, X, 1677–1680, XI, 1681–1685, XII, 1685–1688, XIII, 1689–1692, XIV, January 1693–14 May 1696 and Addenda, 1688–1696, XV, 15 May 1696–31 October 1697, XVI, 27 October 1697–31 December 1698, XVII, 1699, also Addenda, 1621–1698, XVIII, 1700, XIX, 1701, XX, Jan.–Dec. 1, 1702, XXI, 1702–1703, XXII, 1704–1705, XXVI, July 1711–June 1712, XXVIII, August 1714–December 1715, XXXI, January 1719–February 1720, XXXIII, 1722–1723; East Indies and Persia, VIII, 1630–1634; East Indies, China, and Japan, III, 1617–1621, IV, 1622–1624 CSP: Dom. Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI., Mary, Elizabeth, I [and James I], 1547–[1625] …, ed. Robert Lemon et al., 12 vols. (1856; rpt. Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1967) Hatfield House MSS Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, The Cecil Manuscripts (London, 1883–1976) HCA High Court of Admiralty Papers, National Archives, Kew Lansdowne MSS Lansdowne Manuscripts, British Library, London LTP Lords of Trade and Plantations New Jersey Docs. William A. Whitehead et al., eds., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, 10 vols. (Newark, 1880–1949) RCRI John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, 10 vols. (Providence, R.I., 1856–1865) Sloane MSS Sloane Manuscripts, Additional Manuscripts, British Library, London SP State Papers, National Archives, Kew

Introduction

WILLIAM PENN’S PIRATICAL SOCIETY

For there is something more than hanging that must cure this deadly poison.

—William Penn, April 28, 1700

On December 3, 1699, William Penn arrived in Philadelphia Harbor to investigate scandalous accusations that his colony openly fostered global piracy. He was appalled to find men, walking in the streets, who were notorious for committing astounding acts of piracy against Muslim pilgrimage vessels in the Indian Ocean. These predators upon England’s allies were not skulking among some maritime underclass in squalid taverns. Some had bought land in the colonies surrounding the Delaware Bay, where they had settled down with local women, often from established Quaker families. William Markham, Penn’s cousin and appointed deputy governor, had sanctioned his own daughter’s marriage to accused pirate James Brown. Penn’s former personal lawyer in England and now the colony’s attorney general, David Lloyd, had brazenly refused to try these known pirates for their crimes. Quaker justices of the peace Anthony Morris and Edward Shippen frankly admitted that their kinswoman had married one of these brigands and that they personally enjoyed the pirates’ company.¹

The few pirates royal officials did incarcerate had recently escaped the Philadelphia jail with the assistance of the sheriff and influential Quakers. In a not-so-elaborate cover-up, they tore away a fourteen-inch board to simulate a real jailbreak, although witnesses could not believe that men of their bulk could have crept through such a place, especially a pirate named Clinton, a very fat gross man. In Philadelphia’s taverns, the seamen divulged tales of their violent escapades: seizing booty, capturing Indian princesses, and blowing up mosques. Justice Robert Snead, a recent emigrant from Jamaica, was alarmed by how they brag of it publicly over their cups. The Arabian gold and Spanish pieces of eight these sailors introduced into the Delaware Bay market circulated as common currency among merchants, tailors, sailmakers, farmers, and even ministers.²

Robert Quarry, crown-appointed vice admiral of Pennsylvania, West Jersey, and Maryland, reported that, in the colonies surrounding the Delaware Bay, locals had entertained the pyratts, convey’d them from place to place, furnished them with provisions and liquors, and given them intelligence and sheltered them from justice. Residents helped others move to Rhode Island, another colony with largely Quaker leadership. According to Quarry, All those persons that I have employed in searching for and apprehending these pyratts are abused and affronted and called Enemys of the Countrey, for disturbing and hindring honest men (as they are pleased to call the pyrates) from bringing their money and settling amongst them. Six pirates he had captured on the West Jersey side of the bay are at Liberty, for the Quakers there will not suffer the Governor to throw them in prison. Quarry noted a simple fact historians have largely ignored: English sea marauding flourished in the Spanish Indies, the southern Pacific, and the Indian Ocean during piracy’s Golden Age—before the turn of the eighteenth century—because of patronage from the merchant elite on the margins of the English empire.³

Desperately hoping to protect the colony’s relative independence from the defamatory accusations of his political enemies, Penn made a public admission of the colony’s guilt in harboring pirates and called for swift action. With the advice of Pennsylvania’s Legislative Council, Penn issued a printed proclamation:

Whereas several Piracies and Robberies at Sea and on the Sea-Coasts have of late years been committed in Many parts of the World, to the great Injury of Trade, the Terrour and Ruine of many peaceable honest People under Governments in Amity with the Crown of England, and to the horrid Scandal of the English Nation: And whereas divers Persons justly suspected to be guilty of having practised the Aforesaid Crimes, as well by the Nature and Quantity of the Treasure about them, as by their being unable to give any good Account of themselves, their Residence or Commerce, have for some time been observed to land on, and scatter themselves through these Northern English Colonies of America, with a manifest Design of enjoying with Impunity and Safety their ill gotten Riches.

He called upon judges and magistrates to "Pursue, Apprehend and Secure every such Person" and threatened to incarcerate some of the same pious people he only recently had cajoled to risk their lives crossing the tempestuous Atlantic to start anew. His warning was aimed not only at families married to or housing pirates but also individuals who merely possessed East-India, Arabian, or other Foreign Goods or Coins or aided strangers with improbable stories.⁴

This book examines and analyzes the often overt support and protection of illicit sea marauders in maritime communities on the peripheries of England’s burgeoning empire, from its inception at the end of the sixteenth century to its formalization by the early eighteenth century. Men clearly guilty of crimes against the subjects, citizens, and residents of foreign nations allied with England were rarely brought to justice in overseas English ports during most of the seventeenth century, though they likely would have been found guilty of piracy had they faced trial in London. At the end of the sixteenth century, the leading gentry in England’s West Country ports thrived from their promotion of seaborne brigands, who performed a wide range of illegal endeavors. In Ireland and England’s Atlantic colonies, many leading officials explicitly sponsored piracy throughout the seventeenth century. Although rogue seamen could be found in nearly every English Atlantic port, only particular locations at specific times earned international reputations as pirate nests, a pejorative term used by individuals like Robert Quarry whose livelihood depended, not upon the financial backing of local colonial merchants, but upon crown patronage across the Atlantic. Many notorious international pirates began their careers in these ports; many others retired from a life of plundering to become respected members of the local elite.

The swashbuckling activities of deep-sea pirates were integral to the political and social development of the colonial maritime communities that depended upon these adventurers’ goods and services. The narrative here weaves together political and social histories of local port towns with the global narrative of maritime history.⁵ Historians have traditionally attributed the support of piracy in English ports to the basic greed, self-interest, and corruption inherent in fledgling communities. The support of piracy almost always masked far more complicated struggles over political power, the rule of law, and oppressive market regulations. Quarrels between those who advocated illicit maritime violence and those who attempted to obstruct it exposed deeper tensions between local leaders on the peripheries and imperial administrators at the center of power in the metropole, London.

The pirates William Penn observed, for example, reflect long-standing rifts between political and religious factions, not just in Philadelphia but also between neighboring colonies and crown administrators across the Atlantic. Penn feared that the willingness of his colony’s leaders to protect pirates or at least ignore their crimes might provide an opportunity for crown-appointed officials to challenge his proprietary right to Pennsylvania. In this case, many Quakers sincerely believed that attempts to stem English piracy were a cover, allowing their opponents to destroy fundamental English political rights and freedoms. William Penn intended his utopian holy experiment to be a refuge for those oppressed by religious intolerance, specifically to provide the Quakers a place where they could follow their principles of peace. As sole proprietor of the colony, Penn shielded his settlers and their religious freedoms from what he saw as the ever-encroaching powers of imperial administrators.

Similar debates over the legitimacy of numerous forms of maritime violence occurred throughout the English Atlantic, beginning in the late sixteenth century. Commenting on the reputation of the Elizabethan sea dogs Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge notably suggested in 1832: No man is a pirate unless his contemporaries agree to call him so. This was just as true in the early modern world. By the mid-seventeenth century, Pirates during peace transformed into privateers during war. When Robert Quarry complained that local Quakers referred to these sailors as honest men, he was attempting to show his London patrons the criminal propensities of American colonists. Instead, he revealed that those communities genuinely doubted the sea marauders’ criminality—or, at least, believed that transgressions taking place far from their shores did not concern them. Governor Markham doggedly referred to men like his son-in-law as privateers because many possessed documents broadly attesting to their right to prey on England’s enemies, even though the subjects of the Mughal Empire were technically allies. Assuming such justifications simply hid colonists’ self-interest obscures the fact that this mindset was evident throughout the Delaware Bay, and not only among a handful of gentry grandees. Even crown-appointed officials were uncertain what to label these men. The royal governor of Maryland wrote to England, If such people be encouraged they will debauch the inhabitants and make them leave planting to follow the same trade. I very much fear that these sort of privateers, or rather pirates, when they have lavishly spent what they unjustly get, are ready to make a disturbance. The mutability of terms used to describe bandits at sea reflected the ambiguity of the many roles they played in the colonial world, even into the early eighteenth century.⁶

After interviewing dozens of these sailors, Penn, too, began to question how he should define them. His letters to England continued to refer to them as pirates, but he recognized that piracy might merely be one event or phase in a man’s career, not always a lifelong calling. Markham explained that several of the sailors admitted to plundering the shipping of the Mughal Empire, under whose auspices the East India Company operated, but now have houses of their own and families in this town. Their lives were now integrated with communities on land. Others claimed that when they sailed out of the Delaware Bay and headed to the Indian Ocean, they left their Wives and families as pledges of their returne behind them. Penn agreed that some of these men had turned a page in their lives and now followed a life of husbandry, turning planters, whereas the other have trades. He resolved that they should be allowed to safely live with their families on their plantations, but he recommended such men must not be endured to live near the sea-coasts nor trade, lest they become receptacles and broakers for younger pirates. Unwittingly, Penn followed a historical precedent dating back to Aristotle’s Politics that understood piracy as part of a more complex and varied career on both land and at sea involving piratical activities. Technically, during the early modern period, any private captain who did not obtain a commission from a legitimate home government to combat specific enemies during a time of war, or did not return to his home port with the totality of his plunder and pay the appropriate fees to local and crown officials, could be labeled a pirate by both domestic and foreign authorities. Writers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deployed the term piratical to describe a broad spectrum of maritime predation that ranged from unseemly but legally defensible acts to the blatantly criminal act of preying upon all nations. Monopoly companies, foreign combatants, and smugglers were called piratical almost as much as renegade sea bandits were.⁷

Penn developed his conception of the complexity and malleability of sea marauding at an early age. When his father, Admiral Penn, led a raid on the Spanish Indies in 1655, resulting in the capture of Jamaica, he enlisted numerous men who had previously committed acts of piracy. The son argued that his own colony played only a small part in the grand drama of global piracy in the seventeenth century. He wrote to authorities back in England: As for piracy, I must needs say that if Jamaica had not been the seminary, where pirates have commenced Masters of Art, after having practised upon the Spaniard, they would never have had the audacity to continue that lifestyle in the Red and Arabian Seas. Philadelphia was only one node in a global network connecting colonies like Bermuda, New York, and Rhode Island to entrepôts like Madagascar that allowed Indian Ocean piracy to flourish. The same was true of piracy off the coast of Peru in the 1680s, which thrived through networks connecting the Bay of Campeche, Saint Thomas, the Bahamas, the Carolinas, and Boston.⁸

Historians and fiction writers alike have been inclined to categorize pirate as a rigid and readily identifiable type. The modern historiography of English piracy is contingent on the paradigm of an individual detached from human society, in rebellion with the norms and hierarchies presumed to define landed society. This model not only simplifies notions of piracy at sea but also implies a homogeneous society on land with shared social values and economic or political interests. Even historians who attempt to transcend the romance of freebooters to make analytical arguments continue to describe pirates as detached apostates who renounced personal ties and social obligations on land. Admiralty judge Sir Leoline Jenkins enunciated this view when, in 1668, he called them hostis humani generis, or Enemies not of one Nation or of one Sort of People only, but of all Mankind. They lacked the legal protection of any prince, nation, or body of laws, so Every Body is commissioned and is to be armed against them, as against Rebels and Traytors, to subdue and root them out.⁹

The premise that pirates consciously isolated themselves from human society begs the question why one would make such a life-altering decision. One body of work posits that these individuals did so out of a coherent, shared ideology. Some argue men chose a life of piracy to escape sexual restrictions, whereas the few female pirates might have been protofeminist.¹⁰ Other scholars suggest that pirates rebelled against chattel slavery or were proto-proletarian radicals bent on challenging the oppression of burgeoning market capitalism. Or pirates were political revolutionaries whose republican values embodied democratic sentiments that would later drive the American Revolution.¹¹ In such scenarios, pirates protest elements of early modern society we today find reprehensible. Based on a selection of applicable archival material, these histories construct an inspirational, usable past for readers.¹²

A second group of historians dismisses the notion of an articulate ideology, suggesting men turned to piracy simply through blind greed—or perhaps psychosis. The heroes of these narratives are usually the captains of the Royal Navy, whose victories against pirates were crucial to the formation of the early British Empire. However opposed these two basic narratives seem, they share the same paradigm separating communities on land from the remote world at sea. A few modern works have shown the connection of high seas pirates with landed communities, but this work is only a minor adjustment to the model that defines irredeemable high seas pirates cutting deals with corrupt and greedy leaders on land. These works continue to assume that landed communities universally regarded pirates as criminals apart, and that only a few on land were willing to ignore their crimes. Robert C. Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates is one of the first academic treatments of historical piracy that weaves together high seas violence with English imperial politics in London, the West Indies, New York, and the Indian Ocean. Ritchie’s work has been a launching point for this study.¹³

Sir Leoline Jenkins defined pirates from his vantage point at the center of the English empire. Certainly, English sea marauders understood the impediments to safely alighting in London, but that did not make them enemies of all mankind. Outside the law they might have been, but they knew full well that they would find a positive reception in outlying English port communities. For this reason, before the early eighteenth century, few sailors led a life of continual isolation.¹⁴ The sea is a hostile environment unfit for human habitation, offering few of the pleasures of human society. Captains needed safe harbors to repair their ships, victual (obtain supplies of food), gather wood and water, enlist crews, acquire legal documentation that might save them from the gallows, and enjoy social recreation. One colonial merchant claimed, The pirates themselves have often told me that if they had not been supported by the traders from [mainland colonies] with ammunition and provisions according to their directions, they could never have become so formidable. Certainly, a handful of flamboyant mariners with legendary reputations never considered resorting to legitimate commerce as a way of life. Most sailors, though, risked their lives in the misery of an uncertain and violent career, hoping they might ultimately return to a hospitable port so they could enjoy their booty of silver and gold, which served only as worthless ballast at sea.¹⁵

During most of the early modern period, few English mariners who committed acts of piracy actually self-identified as pirates; they were conscious of, and quite concerned about, their reception and image on land. Most English sea marauders of the seventeenth century selectively attacked targets to avoid upsetting political leaders in colonial ports. The fluid conditions on the high seas generated a range of designations—privateers, corsairs, private men-of-war, freebooters, interlopers, buccaneers, and smugglers as much as pirates—sometimes applied loosely and other times very specifically. From the 1590s to the 1730s, the popular use and understanding of these terms developed in relation both to the changing nature of English piracy and to the depictions and debates in private documents and in the public press.¹⁶

Popular print culture, then as well as now, has played a significant role in describing and reporting piracy and in shaping and mediating readers’ perceptions. As England’s empire expanded across the Atlantic during the seventeenth century, popular print media often lionized plunder and bolstered the legal, political, and economic culture that justified the support of piracy in colonial communities.¹⁷ Although some printers produced works slandering English pirates, many more published copious texts denigrating the targets of English piracy, including those at peace and allied with England. Virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim publications flourished at the same time that Protestant English sailors preyed upon innocent Catholic and Muslim victims. Narratives of English peacetime nautical depredations often referenced ancient heroes who also had performed brutal acts in the name of imperial expansion, like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, or more contemporary examples like Sir Francis Drake. Before 1700, pirates or former pirates penned most of the available accounts describing acts of English piracy. English translators and printers even manipulated foreign works originally intended to deride English sea marauders’ actions. Not until the first few decades of the eighteenth century did popular depictions challenge the tradition of the heroic English pirate. Rendering the violence and excesses of piracy concrete and recognizable, and therefore something to be shunned, was an important part of the maturation of imperial political administration. As once-discrete nodes of global illicit trade became integrated into a more formal network of ultimately profitable legal commerce, the information revolution and the rise of a colonial press at the turn of the century made pirates as predators legible to English audiences around the empire.¹⁸

Although there had been laws regulating maritime violence since the late Middle Ages, piracy at sea and its support on land led metropolitan authorities to apply a complicated and, for many, confusing nexus of legal systems. The legal apparatus designed to adjudicate crimes at sea did not always align with laws designed to prosecute crimes on land; the two sometimes nullified each other. Maritime affairs were generally resolved under the civil law, a codified system understood by judicial specialists trained primarily in Doctors’ Commons in London. The common law, a locally based system built upon centuries of precedent, applied to crimes on land. Numerous piracy cases contended with criminal charges committed on land and at sea, often including defendants and complainants from foreign countries. Unsurprisingly, these cases created heated debates over jurisdiction, applicable laws, or criminal process, frustrating and perplexing local communities and foreigners alike. When Englishmen crossed the Atlantic, they not only brought with them fragments of both legal systems but also adapted what they recalled to each new and unique circumstance. Attempts to regulate seaborne violence in newly established coastal settlements raised a complicated question about sovereignty: when high seas crimes involved landed communities, who determined which system of laws applied—the local communities themselves or individuals whose authority originated in the crown? These disputes were not theoretical debates over the nature of sovereignty but divisive contests that often led to violence. Wartime heightened these tensions, when experienced sea marauders were essential for local maritime defense. For example, Robert Quarry saw as legitimate the incarceration of the sailors who arrived in the Delaware Bay because, according to witnesses, available evidence, and even the sailors’ own testimony, they had engaged in behavior defined by law as piracy. However, Quarry was at odds with the local gentry, who drew upon local traditions and customs—including a long-standing practice of ignoring a wide array of maritime depredations—that allowed for a much more lenient stance and justified freeing the accused.¹⁹

The deep, multifaceted political rifts piracy exposed were, not between radical, anarchistic pirates at sea against a rigid hierarchical society on land, but among competing land-based factions.²⁰ The pirates freed from the Philadelphia jail were, in some respects, pawns in a rivalry of metropolitan and local contenders for power in the Delaware Bay: between Penn as proprietor, his former lawyer David Lloyd as leader of the local Quaker faction, Justice Robert Snead and Quarry as beneficiaries of crown patronage, and Anglicans as royalist challengers to the Quaker oligarchy. The Quaker gentry expressed its authority by writing toothless acts against piracy, refusing to bring men to trial, or freeing those who failed to elude capture. Retired pirates who sought to buy land and marry local women were not the ones occupying a truly radical position but rather the political leaders who were willing to risk their lives and property, resorting at times to violence, to fend off imperial interference with their rights and interests. In turn, a distant mother country articulated its authority through parliamentary acts, new administrative bodies, proclamations, the Royal Navy, Admiralty courts, crown-appointed governors, and direct representatives of the crown like Robert Quarry.²¹

Those political, legal, and cultural battles drive the narrative of this book. Repeated economic crises amplified the heated political conflicts revealed by the support of maritime banditry. Colonials perceived such disruptions as a consequence of imperial administrators’ unfair, unjust policies and regulations. These crises fostered moral justifications for overlooking the details of illicit maritime plunder.²² Pirate nests almost always flourished where market imbalances created stark disequilibria between supply and demand. Pirates penetrated lucrative markets closed to English traders because of crown-granted monopolies (like the East India Company or the Royal African Company), broad imperial assertions of sovereignty (like Spain’s claim over most of the New World and Pacific Ocean), and the monopolistic control joint stock companies maintained in their colonial ventures (like the Somers Isles Company in Bermuda). Of particular importance were three categories of greatly desired but woefully undersupplied commodities: bullion (as a local medium of exchange), slaves (as the foundation for longer-term profits from the production of staples), and, by the late seventeenth century, East India goods. The pirates entering the Delaware Bay brought colorfully printed calicos and silks in high demand, produced in India, that would adorn Governor Markham’s wife and daughter. By the early eighteenth century, when peripheral maritime communities gradually gained legal and affordable access to these items, the cordial toleration of piracy dramatically decreased.²³

Local debates over encouraging piracy generally revolved around needs for tangible, short-term profits to alleviate local economic crises versus interests in speculative long-term economic growth based on free trade or the production of reliable exports like plantation products (sugar, tobacco, rice) or fishing. Piracy might have damaged trade on a global or imperial scale (passing costs on to customers or preventing some from trading at all), but it could provide a demonstrable boon to local economies in marginal markets. William Penn understood full well the need to address the Delaware Bay’s economy if piracy was to be controlled: For there is something more than hanging that must cure this deadly poison of locally sponsored global piracy.²⁴

The infusion of piratical plunder into colonial economies (what economists call a supply shock) inspired new recruits who otherwise would likely have been working in nonpredatory, productive export sectors. Booty was so immediately accessible that arguing for slow and seemingly precarious long-term investment in colonial ports required strong, independent voices. Those generally isolated and unpopular sentiments reasoned that planting and looting were rarely compatible. Piracy waned when the opportunity costs of turning to the account, as contemporaries called piracy, were significantly higher than entering profitable legal trades like fishing or the slave trade.²⁵ Some who possessed the unique vision to look beyond the lure of maritime prizes suggested that the victims of piracy, like the Spanish, might instead prove to be prized customers for local products. William Penn denied his colony was dependent upon unlawful profits, asserting, The charge that the inhabitants of this Government have greatly enriched themselves by forbidden trade and the spoils of pirates is utterly false. Through his proclamation and pressure on the House of Assembly to enact legislation, Penn sought to inhibit the market in piracy and prove the uprightness of our intentions. He avowed, perhaps wishfully, that Pennsylvania’s wealth had been and would be built upon the production of commodities: Our industry is well known.²⁶

Controversies over piracy in the seventeenth century linked local conflicts to the growth and development of the British Empire. While Robert Quarry, William Markham, and William Penn quarreled over politics in the Delaware Bay, London political economist and lawyer Charles Davenant published his widely influential Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England in 1698. Davenant understood that private acts of maritime defense leading to piracy could be necessary, for ’tis much more advisable to be in a Posture to do, than to suffer the Injury. Unlike London jurists such as Sir Leoline Jenkins, Davenant saw that overseas expansion required more flexible rules of trade, commerce, and warfare. London administrators might have been skeptical about the value of far-flung settlements that appeared to flourish only when they caused havoc to global trade, but Davenant advocated the long-term value of colonies as sources for raw goods and markets for English manufactures. However, the complicity of local colonial governors and merchants in fostering global piracy had much broader and more substantial imperial repercussions. Although wanting to protect the fundamental liberties that spurred the development of colonial ventures, Davenant recognized that too much freedom cultivated a colonial culture bordering on full-scale independence. Like Penn, Davenant was convinced that if speedy Care be not taken, these Abuses will grow too inveterate, or too big for Correction, leading colonial governors and politicians as it were, to set up for themselves. So pressing was this dilemma that, if not stopped immediately, the colonies may erect themselves into Independent Commonwealths, or Pyratical Societies, which at last we shall not be able to Master.²⁷

For Davenant, piratical included a capacious range of activities, from the anarchistic and antisocial actions of nautical bandits to independent but technically legal attacks against enemy combatants by commissioned, private men-of-war. Piratical violence was an inherent element of empire building; the two endeavors were conceptually related, since piracy and empire shared the same root, peira, meaning trial or attempt.²⁸ Davenant’s vision of piracy resembled that of England’s ancient imperial model, Rome. He explained, "The Roman Nation was first compos’d of Thieves, Vagabonds, Fugitive Slaves, Indebted Persons and Out-laws, but good government made them the most virtuous People that was ever known.²⁹ Once the empire was formally established, Romans, in turn, deemed piratical all who were simply unwilling to live under their political hegemony. They were not enemies of mankind, as Jenkins posited, but rather enemies of civilization, meaning villages forming a society [poleis] on land which refused to accept Roman supremacy." Davenant portrayed a more accurate reflection of the Roman definition of piracy than that of Jenkins. He envisioned the colonies, not as a refuge for global criminals, but as communities on the edges of empire, practicing a variety of piratical behaviors, thriving through plunder, that manifested a defiant reluctance to accept the domination of Whitehall, the center of imperial administration in London.³⁰

Davenant proved prophetic. Each time English piratical societies arose, beginning in the late sixteenth century, they tended to set up for themselves unless circumstances changed to bring them back into the imperial fold. Davenant surmised that sustaining a cohesive empire might require threatening their primitive Institutions, and those Fundamentals, by which they were first united together: Liberty, choice of their own Chief Magistrates and Officers, among other rights.³¹ This was precisely what leaders in the Delaware Bay dreaded in 1699, when many wondered if the rights of Englishmen dissolved in the waters of the Atlantic. Transforming pirate nests into productive and self-sustaining communities required opening once-closed markets, exponential expansion of the slave trade, a political revolution that led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, and the creation of a broad, overarching imperial bureaucracy, as well as informational and financial revolutions. When English peripheral communities finally turned their backs on illicit sea marauding, they found themselves instead integrated into a nascent yet formal and articulated British Empire.

Pirate Nests begins in the late sixteenth century, when Elizabethan lawyers looked back to the Roman Empire in order to understand the means by which ancient leaders once seized control of piratical societies on the edge of their empire and regulated their own countrymen’s crimes at sea. Many of the debates over how to regulate and legislate sea marauding were brought to the fore during the 1590s, particularly in relation to England’s western counties of Devon and Cornwall. Arguments over the economic future of West Country ports or the type of law applicable on the outskirts of the empire would structure similar debates over the next century and a half.

During the first half of the seventeenth century, the lure of profits from maritime plunder played a crucial role in initiating colonization in Ireland, the Caribbean, Virginia, Bermuda, and New England. Those efforts were intended to establish permanent settlements with fully developed exports, but in the early years, they were bolstered by the windfalls acquired from seizing the goods of nominal allies at sea, including the first slaves to English America. Sporadic, private initiative in imperial expansion was followed by the first grand, public initiative during the English Civil War, resulting in the seizure of Jamaica in 1655. During the 1660s and 1670s, Port Royal, Jamaica, emerged as one of the most notorious piratical societies in history. By the 1680s, when Port Royal stopped supporting piracy, Englishmen who plundered the Spanish Main and the South Sea, comprising the coastline of what is today Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama, sailed north to colonies like Charles Town, South Carolina, and Newport, Rhode Island, which welcomed them. After war broke out in 1688, those northern colonies not only harbored sea marauders; they financed and fostered ventures of their own, commissioning captains to ostensibly fight the French, knowing they would turn to outright piracy against Muslim pilgrimage vessels in the Indian Ocean.

In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, royal officials began the intricate modifications that would transform a collection of relatively independent English communities engaged with piracy—many situated next to royal colonies that were not—to a more unified empire. Starting in 1696, these communities rapidly shifted from piratical societies into pirate-hunting communities in response to a number of factors: the rise of legitimate and remunerative trading opportunities, solidified definitions and formal limitations of violence at sea, and a culture that gradually stopped venerating sea marauders. Although many changes were initiated by crown policies or parliamentary acts in the metropole, the real transformation took place in colonial ports, with the explicit agreement and support of local political factions. By the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, English pirates begrudgingly found their former haunts no longer welcomed them. Britain received the asiento, the contract to sell slaves within the Spanish Empire, affording access to one of the last lucrative markets formerly closed to British merchants. By the 1710s, the three major categories of commodity goods no longer faced monopolistic restrictions. Free, or at least increasingly free, trade made pirates at first superfluous and then an affliction.³²

Two of the most flagrant pirate nests of the late seventeenth century—Charles Town and Newport—held the two largest pirate trials in American history, resulting in the execution of twenty-three men in Charles Town on November 8, 1718, followed by the hanging of twenty-six men in Newport on July 19, 1723. After their bodies performed the gruesome sheriff’s dance at the gallows, they were unceremoniously displayed in conspicuous locations, marking the end of what historians now call the Golden Age of British piracy. These and other executions from roughly 1718 to 1726 signaled the emergence of a more coherent and united British Empire. By 1739, with the War of Jenkins’ Ear, a sense of shared imperial goals and economic advantage united both English and American sailors and soldiers in defense of commercial predations against the Spanish. Visions of Spanish plunder had first inspired English sea captains to seek their fortunes on the Main under Elizabeth I. That is where we begin.

1. William Penn to BOT, Philadelphia, Apr. 28, 1700, CO 5/1260, no. 43, Edward Randolph to William Popple, New York, May 12, 1698, 323/2, no. 114. Before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, March 25 often marked the beginning of the year rather than January 1. This meant that documents written from January 1 to March 25 often had a double date, like March 1, 1690/1. I have changed these dates into the modern calendar where the actual date is clear.

2. Robert Snead to Sir John Houblon, Sept. 20, 1697, CO 5/1233, no. 31; Craig Horle et al., eds., Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary, I, 1682–1709 (Philadelphia, 1991), 556; Information of Thomas Robinson, CO 323/2, no. 114ii. On Philadelphia tavern culture, see Peter Thompson, Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1999). The prison break was even more surprising in light of a 1698 promotional pamphlet describing a recently constructed convenient Prison (Gabriel Thomas, An Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and County of Pensilvania and of West New Jersey [London, 1698], 37).

3. Colonel Quarry to BOT, Philadelphia, June 6, 1699, CO 5/1258, no. 31; Quarry to the Lords of Trade, about Pirates in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere, Philadelphia, June 6, 1699, in New Jersey Docs., II, 280–285. Recent works that have largely ignored the involvement of colonial communities in fostering global piracy include Gabriel Kuhn, Life under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy (Oakland, Calif., 2010); Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, N.J., 2009); Colin Woodard, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (Orlando, Fla., 2007); Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston, 2004); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000); Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987); Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, N.Y., 1998).

4. William Penn, By the Proprietary of the Province of Pensilvania, and Counties Annexed with the Advice of the Council, a Proclamation (Philadelphia, 1699).

5. Daniel Vickers calls this marriage maritime culture. He argues that even the best maritime history has largely ignored the shoreside communities from which mariners sprang and to which they returned upon retirement from the sea. Vickers’s Young Men and the Sea exemplifies good maritime history, which incorporates the social and cultural histories of the cities and towns that supplied the labor, goods, family life, and homes of seagoing people. Connecting maritime and social history involves looking beyond tall ships and incorporates the coastal trade, victualing, careening, prize condemnation, smuggling, fencing, impressment, and hiring of crews in port. Pirate ships were no exception to these needs on land. See Vickers, Beyond Jack Tar, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., L (1993), 418, 421; Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, Conn., 2005); Ian K. Steele, Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives, Reviews in American History, XXVI (1998), 70–95. W. Jeffrey Bolster’s work created a history of the North Atlantic where the ocean, rather than simply serving the narrative purpose of separating the Old World from the New, was enlisted instead as a player in the historical drama, one that influenced people and was influenced by them (Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing in the Age of Sail [Cambridge, Mass., 2012], 3).

6. Carl Woodring, ed., The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk (Princeton, N.J., 1990), I, 268; Lieutenant Governor Nicholson to LTP, July 16, 1692, CSP: Col., no. 2344, 674. Janice E. Thomson raises many of these questions in Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 9, 13. Sir Walter Ralegh spelled his name many ways. From 1584 to his death in 1618, he spelled it Ralegh, only signing his name with an i once.

7. William Markham to Penn, Apr. 24, 1697, in Marianne S. Wokeck et al., eds., The Papers of William Penn, III, 1685–1700 (Philadelphia, 1986); Penn to BOT, Philadelphia, Apr. 28, 1700, CO 5/1260, no. 43; Jeremiah Basse to Popple, London, July 15, 1697, in New Jersey Docs., II, 151. One of the most fascinating documents in the British National Archives is a petition by forty-eight wives of pirates, begging the crown to pardon their husbands so that the men might return home to take care of their families (Petition of the Wives and Relations of the Pirates and Buckaneers Now Living in Madagascar, 1708, CO 323/6). Aristotle’s Politics placed piracy alongside farming, fishing, and hunting as methods of social subsistence without resorting to trade. See Henry A. Ormerod, Piracy in the Ancient World: An Essay in Mediterranean History (London, 1924), 71–72.

8. Penn to BOT, Philadelphia, Apr. 28, 1700, CO 5/1260, no. 43.

9. Sir Leoline Jenkins, Opinion on Piracy, in Edwin DeWitt Dickinson, A Selection of Cases and Other Readings on the Law of Nations, Chiefly as It Is Interpreted and Applied by British and American Courts (New York, 1929), 518. Distinguished historian of early modern piracy Marcus Rediker has argued, Although evidence is sketchy, most pirates seem not to have been bound to land and home by familial ties or obligations (Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 49). John J. Richetti notes, The pirate legend derives part of its fascination from the radical political independence and moral isolation that such self-sufficient communities involve. Such a pirate retires occasionally to tropical paradises but typically wages war on civilized humanity (Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns, 1700–1739 [Oxford, 1969], 67, 76n). Along the same lines, see Chris Land, Flying the Black Flag: Revolt, Revolution, and the Social Organization of Piracy in the ‘Golden Age,’ Management and Organizational History, II (2007), 169–192.

10. On gender and sexuality, see Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York, 1999); B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Perception of Evil: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (New York, 1983); Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (New York, 1995); Marcus Rediker, Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates, in C. R. Pennell, ed., Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader (New York, 2001), 299–320.

11. Kenneth J. Kinkor, Black Men under the Black Flag, in Pennell, ed., Bandits at Sea, 195–210; Barry Clifford, The Black Ship: The Quest to Recover an English Pirate Ship and Its Lost Treasure (London, 1999); Rediker, Villains of All Nations; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra; Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; Land, Flying the Black Flag, Management and Organizational History, II (2007), 169–192; Woodard, Republic of Pirates, 1.

12. This trend began with Malcolm Cowley, The Sea Jacobins, New Republic, Feb. 1, 1933, 327–329; and see Christopher Hill, Radical Pirates? in Margaret Jacob and James Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London, 1984), 17–32. This work follows upon the heels of historians of English crime, generally protégés of E. P. Thompson, who believed that public executions were the central event in the urban contention between the classes, and indeed were meant to be so. See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992), xvii; Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975); and E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, 1975).

13. Lane, Pillaging the Empire; Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars (London, 2003); David Cordingly, Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (New York, 2011); Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (1986; rpt. New York, 2006). For modern works that connect pirates with landed communities, see Cyrus H. Karraker, Piracy Was a Business (Ringe, N.H., 1953); Clifford Beal, Quelch’s Gold: Piracy, Greed, and Betrayal in Colonial New England (Westport, Conn., 2007); Patrick Pringle, Jolly Roger: The Story of the Great Age of Piracy (New York, 1953); Douglass Burgess, The Pirate’s Pact: The Secret Alliances between History’s Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America (Chicago, 2008); David Starkey, Pirates and Markets, in Pennell, ed., Bandits at Sea, 107–124. Most of these were intended for a popular audience, so they were written to expose and entertain rather than explain. An exception to this is Kevin P. McDonald’s excellent analysis of piracy and the New York slave market (McDonald, Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World (Berkeley, Calif., 2015).

14. One exception would be the buccaneers of the early- to mid-seventeenth century, discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, below.

15. Mr. Gale to Col. Thomas Pitt, Jr., South Carolina, Nov. 4, 1718, CSP: Col., no. 31i, 10.

16. Even today, Somali pirates refer to themselves as members of a coast guard, and Nigerian pirates often claim membership to some liberation army. Jay Bahadur’s work notes that Somali pirates do not refer to themselves as pirates in their native tongue but "referred to themselves as badaadinta badah, ‘saviours of the sea,’ a term that is most often translated in the English-speaking media as ‘coast guard.’" The difference in meaning is the gap between