During the era when Spain controlled the Spanish Netherlands — today, Belgium — and was at war with the Netherlands, which were revolting against Spanish rule. In 1583 the Duke of Parma captured the port of Dunkirk, and established it as the base of the Armada de Flandes (Fleet of Flanders). While this began as a squadron of royal warships, the Spanish authorities in the Low Countries began issuing letters of marque turning private citizens into licensed pirates called privateers, and before long a hundred privateering ships were operating out of Dunkirk.
They mainly preyed on Dutch merchant and fishing ships, and at the peak of their activities during the 1620s, were capturing more than two hundred Dutch ships per year. The English also fell victim to the Dunkirk privateers, who roamed as far as the Baltic and Mediterranean, though concentrating their activities in the English Channel and southern North Sea. This made England use the same tactic against Spain in the Caribbean.
During the ”golden age” of piracy in the late 1600s and early 1700s, a pirate ship was one of the few places a black man could attain power and money in the Western Hemisphere. Some of these black pirates were escaped slaves in the from the coastal areas of the Americas. Others joined pirate crews when their slave ships or plantations were raided; it was often an easy choice between perpetual slavery and freedom through lawlessness. It is estimated that more than 40% of the 10,000 plus known pirates during the golden age of piracy were former slaves.
While many were still mistreated and forced to do the lowest tasks aboard ship, most captains had to establish equality among their men, regardless of race. On these ships, black pirates would vote, bear arms, and receive an equal share of the booty. Back on the mainland, however, justice for black and white pirates was not equal. White pirates were usually hanged as criminals regardless of age, but black pirates were often returned to their owners or otherwise resold into slavery—a fate worse than death for some.
Captain John Coxen lived and commanded a band of pirates in the south western area of Roatan known today as Coxen Hole, from around 1687 to 1697.Captain John Coxen, sometimes referred to as John Coxon, was a late-seventeenth-century buccaneer who terrorized the Spanish Main. Coxen was the most famous of the Brethren of the Coast, a loose consortium of pirates and privateers. Brethren of the Coast were pirates and buccaneers that were active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico. They mostly met in two locations, the island of Tortuga off the coast of Haiti and in the city of Port Royal on the island of Jamaica. John Coxen had his own hidden hideaway on Roatan off the coast of the Honduras.
The Brethren were a syndicate of captains with letters of marque a license to attack enemies of their benefactors nation, and reprisal who were originally refugees who settled in Hispaniola, mostly French Huguenots and British Protestants. They would supply wares to visiting ships in exchange for guns and ammunition, an activity which led to the Spanish driving them out. These former refugees lived in something akin to a republic. Despite their origins their ranks swelled as they were joined by other adventurers of various nationalities, including Spaniards, African sailors, as well as escaped slaves and outlaws of various sovereigns.
The English had their heyday around the 1650s, when they seized Tortuga from the Spanish. The Brethren privateers were issued letters of marque to defend the island from the Spanish and raid Catholic French and Spanish shipping. The government license marque was priceless in the Age of Sail in that it authorized a private person, known as a privateer or corsair, to attack and get rich through piracy legally and retired a wealthy man as long as he was never caught by the nation he was hired to rob.
A letter of marque was considered an honorable calling that combined patriotism and profit. In practice, the differences between privateers and pirates were often at best subtle and at worst a matter of interpretation. In addition to referring to the license, the terms "letter of marque" and "privateer" were sometimes used to describe the vessels used to pursue and capture prizes. In this context, a letter of marque was a lumbering, square-rigged cargo carrier that might pick up a prize if the opportunity arose in its normal course of duties. In contrast, the term privateer generally referred to a fast and weatherly fore-and-aft rigged vessel, well armed and carrying more crew, intended exclusively for fighting. Much of these crews were captured slaves from the Spanish and Portuguese that were eager for revenge!
Letters of marque allowed governments to fight their wars using private captains and sailors, akin to mercenary soldiers, to hunt down enemies and fight their wars instead of using their navies. Oftentimes it was cheaper and easier for governments to issue letters of marque to privateers than to maintain a longstanding navy. Instead of building, funding, and maintaining a navy in times of peace and in times of war, governments would issue letters of marque to privateers so they could fight the nation's battles. This way, the government issuing the letter of marque were not responsible to fix or maintain any of the privateers' ships since they were owned by the privateers.
One of the most famous black pirates was Black Caesar, who raided ships in the seas around the Florida Keys for almost a decade before joining Blackbeard aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge. Like many pirates, his life is shrouded in daring legend, but he was apparently a very large and very cunning man. Many accounts state that he was a former African chieftain who had evaded capture by slavers several times before succumbing to a cruel deception. Aboard the slave ship, he was befriended by a sailor who gave him food and water. As they neared the Florida coast, a hurricane provided the confusion the two needed for an armed escape on a rowboat, and they were evidently the only survivors of the storm.
For several years thereafter, the pair amassed a considerable fortune by posing as shipwrecked sailors and violently robbing vessels that offered them assistance. They allegedly buried their bounty on Elliott Key. Black Caesar was eventually able to hire on more crew and began attacking ships on the open sea. It is said that he kept a prison camp and possibly a harem of kidnapped women in the Keys he was accused in story of failing to leave his captives with provisions during his voyages, and many it was said to death. It was also said that the dozens of children he had beget from his captives roamed the Island and started their own tribe so to speak as pirates in training.
In the early 1700s Black Caesar joined Blackbeard's crew as his lieutenant and was there for Blackbeard's death at the hands of Lieutenant Robert Maynard. Following this defeat, Black Caesar was captured with the surviving crew by Virginia colonial authorities and was hanged in Williamsburg Virginia in 1718.
Edward Teach (1680–1718), better known as Blackbeard, was a notorious English pirate in the Caribbean Sea during the early 18th century, a period of time referred to as the Golden Age of Piracy. His best known vessel was the Queen Anne's Revenge, which is believed [citation needed] to have run aground near Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina in 1718 The General History claims that he had as many as fourteen wives, most of them common-law, but documentation is lacking. His last wife was Mary Ormond (or Ormand) of Bath, North Carolina, to whom he was married for only a short while. A painting of him hangs in Van Der Veer House ,in Bath.
Blackbeard often fought, or simply showed himself, wearing a big feathered tricorn, and having multiple swords, knives, and pistols at his disposal. It was reported in The General History of the Pirates that he had hemp and lighted matches woven into his enormous black beard during battle. Accounts of people who saw him fighting[citation needed] say that they thought he "looked like the devil" with his fearsome face and the smoke cloud around his head. This image, which he cultivated, has made him the premier image of the seafaring pirate.
For a pirate clothing was much more valuable than it is today. Weaving, cutting, sewing and finishing clothes was all done by hand by skilled artisans, instead of whipped out by high-speed electric looms, laser-cutters, industrial sewing machines, and starvation-waged Chinese workers. Not only was clothing a major expense, but second-hand clothes were much more valuable as well. And third-hand clothing. And so on. Even the rich saved clothing that was out of style or worn, recycling it and re-working it into new garments. Or they handed them down to servants, who re-dyed and re-worked them into everyday clothes, or sold them for a substantial profit. So, when pirates stole clothing and wore it, even though by today's standards they may look ridiculous for their time they weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary.
BUT, the corollary to this is that people could identify stolen clothing. Think about it. If one of your dress shirts was stolen, you’d have a hard time picking it out of a lineup. But 18th century people would have known immediately whose shirt was whose. During trials from the time, identification of stolen clothing often sent thieves to jail, the pillory or the gallows. Follow this one more step, and you’ll realize that there were no brands. Today we depend on brands to decide what to buy. Some brands are affordable, some not. Some fit us well, others don’t. And if you want to convey status, you depend on the tag inside or the logo printed outside your clothing. In fact, the label is often the most important part of the item.
For a well to do pirate item was hand made the only name that mattered was his. This meant that the parts of a house, or a ship, or a gun, were all purpose-built for that house, that ship, that gun. Which meant that if you tried to take the door off one house, it would not fit into another doorway. If you took the parts off one ship they might not fit into another ship. (This was one of the reasons carpenters were so important on a ship – new parts needed, at best, to be re-shaped to fit the ship, and at most built especially for the ship.) Like his clothes everything fit his sense of style.
Pistols, muskets, and even cannons had parts that were not interchangeable. Today, if you have a Beretta 9mm, you can take parts for it from any other Beretta 9mm in the world. During the 18th century, not only could you not necessarily use the parts from one pistol to repair another pistol, but there was no reliable brand of pistol (or musket or cannon to buy. There was no Walmart for Muskets! Individual gunsmiths had a local reputation, but once the weapon in question had left the region, it would not be recognized. Each weapon would be valued according to its individual quality and usefulness. And no two guns were ever quite the same.
In some ways, this accounts for the hodge-podge look of a pirate ship and a pirate crew. When a new ship was being fitted out, the builders would buy all the cannons from the same foundry, and therefore all of them would look much the same. But a pirate crew amassed its weaponry from a number of sources – stealing a cannon here, a brace of pistols there… So each piece would look quite different. They had style!
Think for a moment about what this means. Today we expect regularity in things. Every stitch in a garment is the same as every other. Every t-shirt in the pile is exactly the same. Windows come in standard sizes, and we see them in the houses around us without even noticing. We see identical cars, identical phones, identical chairs and tables and toys and even identical pieces of art. In the days of the pirates, each piece was unique.
Is it important? Maybe, maybe not. But if you I for one like to think of things, people, eras, in context. And the individuality of things in the past is an important part of the pirate context.
History has romanticized Blackbeard. Many popular contemporary engravings show him with the smoking lit ends of his pigtails or with lit cannon fuses in his hair and the pistols stuck in his bandoliers, and he has been the subject of books, movies, and documentaries. There is a Blackbeard Festival in Hampton, Virginia every year and the crew of the modern day British warship HMS Ranger commemorate his defeat at the annual Sussex University Royal Naval Unit Blackbeard Night mess dinner in November.mours for schemes of delusion. A ship believed to have been Blackbeard's was discovered near Beaufort, North Carolina in 1996 and is now part of a major tourist attraction.
Sugar was not native to the New World. It had been domesticated, New Guinea about around eight thousand BC. Trade in sugar quickly was traded to Southeast Asia and China, and then to India, where Dravidian people first discovered how to make the kind of granulated sugar that we buy in the store today.Indian sailors, consumers of clarified butter and sugar, carried sugar by various trade routes. Travelling Buddhist monks brought sugar crystallization methods to China. Sugar cane was first grown extensively in medieval Southern Europe during the period of Moorish rule in Sicily beginning around the 9th century. In addition to Sicily, Al-Andalus Cale and Romany people brought the Barb horses from North Africa which were bred to become Sorraia .
Andalusian horses are hot-blooded, also known as Iberian horses, and descend from Sorraia horses – today this breed is kept only in small numbers in Portugal. where the (in what is currently southern Spain) was an important center of sugar production, beginning by the tenth century.
The mill used a stone wheel, driven either by harnessed animals or by slave labor, which crushed the stalks. This released the sweet sugar sap, which was drained, collected, refined and boiled until the water evaporated and it became crystallized sugar.
Sugar refining has progressed over the years, and the product produced during the Golden Age of Piracy was a slightly sticky product, pale, but not as white as today’s sugar. Nevertheless, it was called “white gold” and quickly became the source of enormous profit. Today, the average American eats an average of 100 pounds of sugar a year. In 1700, the average was closer to 4 pounds per year. But this was very much stratified by income. A single pound of sugar cost as much a laborer made in two days. Archeologists can determine the income level of bodies from the early 1700’s by looking at the teeth. Sugar consumption meant that the bodies of the rich had badly decomposed teeth. Poor people (like pirates) had healthy, white teeth in comparison.
The work of growing and harvesting the cane was brutal. The tall cane stalks provided little shade for workers, while blocking any available breeze. Cane leaves were sharp on the edges, and cut the skin. The labor of cutting the stalks, stripping the leaves and carrying stalks to the grinder was exhausting. And the boiling kettles, often in the open under a tropical sun, produced killing temperatures. Europeans couldn't survive the tropical heat if they farmed cane. Small family farms simply could not do this. So, large plantations, powered by slaves, became the norm. Barbados was the most valuable colony in the English empire because of its sugar production, and as sugar spread, the slave society grew with it.
In the very early days, slaves were often Irish rebels, or poor British citizens, transported to the Caribbean because of minor crimes. But these people simply could not stand the heat and the sun for very long for them plantations were a death sentence within 6 months. Plantation owners quickly switched to kidnapped Africans, who worked 18 hours a day in the cane fields. It is estimated that the average life expectancy of a slave in the cane field was two to three years.
The plantation owners, surrounded and outnumbered by slaves, were constantly nervous. They feared slave uprisings, and demanded armed support from the government. This in turn supported the militarization of the English colonies.
"The slaves, meanwhile, worked to death, created horror stories in which dead slaves were raised to work on or get revenge on their masters after they had been laid to rest. These “zombie” stories still permeate modern Caribbean pirate mythology."
Sugar, as a luxury item, was also heavily taxed. England valued its sugar-producing colonies more than its mainland colonies because of the income they produced. It’s even been argued that England didn’t put its full effort behind fighting the American Revolution because they were busy defending Barbados from smugglers and pirates. Pirates probably ate the sugar that they captured, but recipes containing sugar were still somewhat rare. Cany usually consisted of seeds or small fruits dipped in sugar and dried. Sugar was consumed in tea and coffee. Jams and jellies – fruit preserved by sugar – was just becoming popular, but pirates probably didn’t have the means to create these, and would have just consumed any such products they captured.
Rum and sugar production go hand in hand, since rum is made of the waste products of the sugar manufacturing industry. Molasses – unrefined sugar cane juice – is fermented into rum. In approximately our period (circa 1700) Barbados alone was producing approximately 467,000 gallons of rum a year. So that’s the basic situation. Pirates drank rum produced by sugar producers, captured ships laden with sugar and sold the sugar at a discount to merchants who had a ready market for it. Slaves – either escaped from sugar plantations or liberated by pirates from captured ships swelled the ranks of the pirates, and pirates dined in fine style on sugar products. In some instances, pirates even supported slave uprisings on sugar plantations.
The situation in which a few lucky individuals owned most of the resources, and the vast majority of people owned little or nothing fueled the fires of piracy and stirred men into desperate rebellion. Sugar shaped the Caribbean, and the Caribbean shaped the pirates. One of Christopher Columbus’s first action upon making land in the Caribbean was to enslave several of the natives. He reported to Spain that the people already living in the Caribbean would make good slaves. This was the beginning of European slavery in the New World.
Comments