The Golden Age of Piracy was the period between the 1650s and the 1730s, when maritime piracy was a significant factor in the histories of the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans.Powell, Walter A. (1928) A History of Delaware. Literary Licensing, LLC. p. 98. ISBN 978-1258464684Kemp, Ross (2009) Pirates. Michael Joseph. p. 11. ASIN B01K956A7W
Histories of piracy often subdivide the Golden Age of Piracy into three periods:Flores, Lisa Pierce (2009). The History of Puerto Rico. Greenwood. p. 70. ISBN 978-0313354182
The buccaneering period (approximately 1650 to 1680), characterized by Anglo-French seamen based in Jamaica, Martinique, and Tortuga attacking Spanish colonies, and shipping in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to western Pacific., pp. 5–7. First published in the United States by St. Martin's Press, New York as Brethren of the Coast: Buccaneers of the South Seas. The Pirate Round (1690s), associated with long-distance voyages from various Caribbean and North American ports to established bases in countries like Madagascar, in order to rob Muslim and East India Company targets in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.David Cordingly, ed. Pirates: A Worldwide Illustrated History, North Dighton, MA: World Publications Group, 1998, chapter 7, "The Pirate Round" by Jenifer G. Marx, p. 141. The post-Spanish Succession period (1715 to 1730), when English sailors and privateers left unemployed by the end of the War of the Spanish Succession turned en masse to piracy in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the North American eastern seaboard, and the West African coast.Boot, Max (2009). "Pirates, Then and Now". Foreign Affairs. 88 (4): 94–107.
Narrower definitions of the Golden Age sometimes exclude the first or second periods, but most include at least some portion of the third. The modern conception of pirates as depicted in popular culture is derived largely, although not always accurately, from the Golden Age of Piracy.
Factors contributing to piracy during the Golden Age included the rise in quantities of valuable cargoes being shipped to Europe over vast ocean areas, reduced European navies in certain regions, the training and experience that many sailors had gained in European navies (particularly the British Royal Navy), and corrupt and ineffective government in European overseas colonies. Colonial powers at the time constantly fought with pirates and engaged in several notable battles and other related events.
Name of the Golden Age
Origin
The oldest known literary mention of a "Golden Age" of piracy is from 1894, when the English journalist George Powell wrote about "What appears to have been the golden age of piracy up to the last decade of the 17th century."George Powell, "A Pirate's Paradise," in The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. CCLXXVI, N.S. 52, Jan–June 1894, p. 23. Powell uses the phrase while reviewing Charles Leslie's A New and Exact History of Jamaica, then over 150 years old. Powell uses the phrase only once.
In 1897, a more systematic use of the phrase "Golden Age of Piracy" was introduced by historian John Fiske, who wrote, "At no other time in the world's history has the business of piracy thriven so greatly as in the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth. Its golden age may be said to have extended from about 1650 to about 1720."John Fiske, 1897, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, p. 338. Fiske included the activities of the Barbary corsairs and East Asian pirates in this "Golden Age," noting that "as these Mussulman pirates and those of Eastern Asia were as busily at work in the seventeenth century as at any other time, their case does not impair my statement that the age of the buccaneers was the Golden Age of piracy."Fiske, p. 339.
Pirate historians of the first half of the 20th century occasionally adopted Fiske's term "Golden Age," without necessarily following his beginning and ending dates for it.R.D.W. Connor, 1909, Cornelius Harnett: An Essay in North Carolina History, P. 10; Francis Hodges Cooper, 1916, "Some Colonial History of Beaufort County, North Carolina," in James Sprunt Studies in History and Political Science, v. 14, no. 2, p. 32. The most expansive definition of an age of piracy was that of Patrick Pringle, who wrote in 1951 that "the most flourishing era in the history of piracy ... began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ended in the second decade of the eighteenth century."Patrick Pringle, 1951, Jolly Roger: The Story of the Great Age of Piracy, p. 9 of the 2001 edition. This idea starkly contradicted Fiske, who had hotly denied that such Elizabethan figures as Francis Drake were pirates.Fiske, pp. 341–342.
Trend toward narrow definitions Of recent definitions, that given by Pringle appears to have the widest range, an exception to an overall trend among historians from 1909 until the 1990s, toward narrowing the Golden Age. As early as 1924, Philip Gosse described piracy as being at its height "from 1680 until 1730." In his highly popular 1978 book The Pirates for TimeLife's The Seafarers series, Douglas Botting defined the Golden Age as lasting "barely 30 years, starting at the close of the 17th Century and ending in the first quarter of the 18th."Douglas Botting, 1978, The Pirates, p. 20. Botting's definition was closely followed by Frank Sherry in 1986.Frank Sherry, 1986, Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy, p. 7. In a 1989 academic article, Professor Marcus Rediker defined the Golden Age as lasting only from 1716 to 1726.Marcus Rediker, 1989, "'Under the Banner of King Death': The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates 1716–1726", William and Mary Quarterly, ser. 3, 38 (1981), 203–227. Angus Konstam in 1998, reckoned the era as lasting from 1700 until 1730.F; Konstam, supra, p. 5.
Perhaps the ultimate step in restricting the Golden Age was in Konstam's 2005 The History of Pirates, in which he retreated from his own earlier definition, called a 1690–1730 definition of the Golden Age "generous," and concluded that "The worst of these pirate excesses was limited to an eight-year period, from 1714 until 1722, so the true Golden Age cannot even be called a 'golden decade.Angus Konstam, 2005, The History of Pirates, p. 96.
Recent countertrend toward broader meaning David Cordingly, in his influential 1994 work Under the Black Flag, defined the "great age of piracy" as lasting from the 1650s to around 1725, very close to Fiske's definition of the Golden Age.David Cordingly, 1995, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates, pp. xvi–xvii.
Rediker, in 2004, described the most complex definition of the Golden Age to date. He proposes a "golden age of piracy, which spanned the period from roughly 1650 to 1730," which he subdivides into three distinct "generations": the buccaneers of 1650–1680, the Indian Ocean pirates of the 1690s, and the pirates of the years 1716–1726.Marcus Rediker, 2004, Villains of All Nations, p. 8.
History
Piracy arose out of, and mirrored on a smaller scale, conflicts over trade and colonization among the rival European powers of the time, including the empires of Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and France. Most pirates in this era were of English, Welsh, Dutch, Irish, and French origin. Many pirates came from poorer urban areas, such as the ports of London, in search of a way to make money and of reprieve. Piracy, therefore, offered power and quick riches.
Buccaneering period, c. 1650–1680
Historians such as John Fiske mark the beginning of the Golden Age of Piracy at around 1650, when the end of the Wars of Religion allowed European countries to resume the development of their colonial empires. This involved considerable seaborne trade and a general economic improvement: there was money to be madeor stolenand much of it traveled by ship.
French buccaneers had established themselves on northern Hispaniola as early as 1625, but lived at first mostly as hunters of pigs and cattle rather than robbers; their transition to full-time piracy was gradual and motivated in part by Spanish efforts to wipe out both the buccaneers and the prey animals on which they depended. The buccaneers' migration from Hispaniola's mainland to the more defensible offshore island of Tortuga limited their resources and accelerated their piratical raids. According to Alexandre Exquemelin, a buccaneer and historian from this period, the Tortuga buccaneer Pierre Le Grand pioneered the settlers' attacks on galleons making the return voyage to Spain. The French buccaneer François l'Olonnais (Jean-David Nau) was known for his extreme infamous cruelty towards Spanish prisoners on the island of Martinica, which served as a home port for French buccaneers like him, allowing the French to operate in the Caribbean against Spanish ships.
The growth of buccaneering on Tortuga was augmented by the English capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655. The early English governors of Jamaica freely granted letters of marque to Tortuga buccaneers and to their own countrymen, while the growth of Port Royal provided these raiders with a far more profitable and enjoyable place to sell their booty. In the 1660s, the new French governor of Tortuga, Bertrand d'Ogeron, similarly provided privateering commissions both to his own colonists and to English cutthroats from Port Royal. These conditions brought Caribbean buccaneering to its zenith, culminating in Henry Morgan's Panama expedition in 1670 which saw Panama City plundered, sacked, and burned the following year.
The devastations brought by buccaneers finally drove the Spanish crown to authorize privateering, which they had traditionally allowed only in very limited ways, in order to hunt down piracy and contraband. This led to the emergence of the guarda costa, who would become especially relevant the following century.
Pirate Round, c. 1693–1700
A number of factors caused English pirates, some of whom had been introduced to piracy during the buccaneering period, to look beyond the Caribbean for treasure as the 1690s began. The Glorious Revolution had restored the traditional enmity between Britain and France, thus ending the profitable collaboration between English Jamaica and French Tortuga. The devastation of Port Royal by an earthquake in 1692 further reduced the Caribbean's attractions by destroying the pirates' chief market for fenced plunder.Nigel Cawthorne (2005), Pirates: An Illustrated History, Arturus Publishing Ltd., 2005, p. 65. Caribbean colonial governors began to discard the traditional policy of "no peace beyond the Line," under which it was understood that war would continue (and thus letters of marque would be granted) in the Caribbean regardless of peace treaties signed in Europe; henceforth, commissions would be granted only in wartime, and their limitations would be strictly enforced. Furthermore, much of the Spanish Main had simply been exhausted; Maracaibo alone had been sacked thrice between 1667 and 1678,Cawthorne, pp. 34, 36, 58 while Río de la Hacha had been raided five times and Tolú eight.Peter Earle (2003), The Pirate Wars, , p. 94.