Privateers and Pirates in the Spanish Atlantic

ENDNOTES

The pirates and privateers who relentlessly preyed upon Spanish colonies and treasure ships during the notoriously cutthroat, revolutionary age of sail have become the stuff of legend. Many people of the modern world imagine the audacious seafarers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as daring, ruthless heroes who were hungry for both the thrilling adventures and the immense wealth that thievery on the ocean could bring. The common depiction of a pirate’s life that persists to the twenty-first century is one of epic sea battles, boundless freedom, drunken nights on white sand beaches, and, of course, unhinged vice in the port cities’ taverns and brothels. While this interpretation of a seafarer’s existence is not entirely inaccurate, it is crucial to consider that pirates and privateers were far from simply mindless, murderous bands of renegades who merely thieved for the sake of thieving and left nothing behind in their wake. Many men—and in some cases women—accused of piracy and privateering were in fact renowned for their advanced military strategy, their acute political awareness, and their ability to shape entire American and Caribbean narratives with the sharpened tips of their blades and the black smoke of their cannons. These sea thieves contributed greatly to how the early Atlantic world unfolded, and one of the undoubtable reasons as to why the hostile relationship between the European colonizers

“An action between an English ship and vessels of the Barbary Corsairs” by Willem van de Velde de Jonge. 1633-1707. Wikipedia. Fair use.

of the Spanish Main and the pirates and privateers who so violently disrupted their efforts is such an alluring topic is because Spanish conquest and the terrorism of criminals at sea is so closely interlinked with the history of the Atlantic world as a whole. Spain’s vicious encounters with privateers and pirates originating from their neighbours on the European continent not only greatly contributed to the country’s bitter political relations with other nations, particularly England, but they also shaped the outcome of various colonization attempts and they ultimately went on to determine how the Spanish went about building their seemingly indestructible empire in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is for this reason that it is so critical for historians to recognize that pirates and privateers should be recognized as figures far more calculated, complex, and impactful than the awe-inspiring epitomes of rebellion, fortitude, and violence often portrayed in Hollywood films. On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean on an expedition to seek out a western route to the Indies.1 The Spanish motivation to leave Europe and explore the other side of the globe seemed to be primarily religious at first. Aware that there were pagan people of other nations who had not yet been “discovered” by the Christians, the Europeans were convinced that they had been called by God to introduce Roman Catholicism to the indigenous people of the Americas so that their souls might be saved.2 It was also no coincidence that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the age in which the so-called age of discovery was unfolding, coincided perfectly with

“Old town Potosi with Cerro Rico mountain Bolivia” by Benedek,(2018). istockphoto.com.

the religious competition that divided Christians in the midst of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. Spain was a firmly Catholic country at the time, which meant that efforts to convert the Indigenous population to Christianity began immediately after Columbus landed in the Caribbean.3 However, it quickly became clear that genuine concern for the souls of Indigenous populations was not at the heart of European exploration. The Spanish were in fact motivated by the mercantilist model, which stated that the total resources available in the world could only be distributed into the hands of a select few who emerged in triumph, either through military or colonial victories.4

The true objective behind Spanish expansion was wealth and power and they soon found this wealth in the Americas in the form of vast quantities of gold, and especially silver.5 In order to extract the precious metals, slavery, which had long been practiced in the Iberian Peninsula, was used as an instrument by the Spanish authorities in the Americas alongside precolonial methods of labor drafts to secure a workforce within the vast numbers of Indigenous people they figured they could exploit.6 It was the nature of the Spanish to colonize most extensively areas where pre-existing civilizations were located. Densely settled and economically advanced societies such as the Inca Empire dominating much of modern Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, controlled important deposits of expensive minerals.7 These lands served as the ideal target for Spanish expansion. When word got out that gold had been discovered, Europeans, mostly men, began to pour into the Caribbean.8 Hispaniola was the first focus of colonization efforts,9 but after 1545 Spanish mining of extraordinarily rich veins of silver at Potosí (today’s Bolivia) produced a massive flow of bullion that financed Spanish economic growth and war campaigns.10

With the exploitation of severely overworked, abused, and underpaid slaves, the Spanish managed to become so wealthy so quickly from their harvesting of minerals from the Americas that in 1559 it was claimed that “from his realms his majesty (King Philip II) receives every year an income of five millions of gold in times of peace: one and one-half millions from Spain; a half-million from the Indies; one from Naples and Sicily, and another from Flanders and the Low Countries.”11 Spreading violence, disease, and enslavement across South America and the Caribbean in the pursuit of riches, the Spanish also took advantage of the dyes and dyewoods, medicinal plants, tobacco, hides, chocolate, and various foods and flavourings they could find within the foreign landscapes.12 They became so extravagantly wealthy over time that it was not long before their prosperity was the envy of the rest of Europe and their success attracted all sorts of unwanted attention. Huge amounts of wealth drew sea-roving adventurers of all sorts, legitimate and illegitimate, to the Spanish Main to seek their own fortunes. And, as can be predicted, waves of privateer and pirate attacks became an inevitable hurdle to Spanish greatness.

Pirating was practiced from the time that goods first began being traded by water, but the period from the twelfth century onward marked a pronounced surge in crime at sea as the world saw a major increase in seaborne trade and global exploration.13 Pirates did not operate in an economic sphere entirely separate from that of regular maritime trade. Because there was an absence of a comprehensive maritime law as well as available authorities that could have enforced it, there was oftentimes no clear distinction between merchants and thieves. In fact, the same individuals shouldered different roles according to their changing circumstances, which meant that armed merchant vessels could easily become aggressors