[00.07]
Pantomime villains, box office gold and famous (or infamous) shadowy figures of fiction and non-fiction, pirates are familiar stereotypes in popular media. But these common images hide a critically important group of men (and occasionally women) who were socially, economically and politically significant in shaping the European maritime empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Therefore, pirates and piracy have become increasingly recognised as an important focus for historical research and analysis. This challenge has been taken up by Dr Richard Blakemore of the University of Reading in his book, Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Pirates.
In this programme, Dr Blakemore discusses the real economic and social significance of piracy and introduces Publisher Mike Gibbs to the role pirates played in the forging and growth of Britain’s maritime empire.
[01.12]
Mike Gibbs: Richard, as a distinguished naval historian, what brought you to this topic and why did you choose it for your new book?
Richard Blakemore: I’m not so sure about the ‘distinguished’, but I’ve been teaching a class on the history of piracy at the University of Reading for some years now, and the book is really based very much on that teaching, and I think it’s a really interesting topic for a number of reasons. One is that everyone has this image of pirates in their head. If you say the word ‘pirate’, you can guess with 99 per cent accuracy what that image is, and so it’s a great topic as a starting point, something students recognise and indeed, I hope, readers recognise. But it also links to so many much more complicated dimensions of history from the period that I’m writing about. So, there’s the question of how did that image of piracy come into existence? There’s the question of how much does the myth and modern popular culture that’s basically everywhere, especially if, like me, you have small children and they live in a world of toys. There are so many pirate toys and TV shows and so on, so how much does that image owe to the actual history.
And then, of course, there’s the impact of piracy on world history, the significance for empire, for economics, for international law. Piracy is a really crucial driver of the development of international law, so I think piracy gives you a starting point, the history of piracy gives you a starting point that draws you in, but then is a way to get into and explore all of these much more complicated and interesting dimensions of history.
[03.00]
Mike Gibbs: Let’s dig into that a little more. What fresh and different insights have you developed as you’ve got more and more involved in this research?
Richard Blakemore: I think one of the big points that historians have talked about a lot – and I want to make clear that I’ve drawn on many other scholars’ work for the teaching and in this book. I owe many debts to historians working in this field, and indeed piracy studies has really expanded in recent decades in a way that many listeners might not know about, but it’s a very exciting field in maritime history and history more generally.
I think one element that’s really important is about the question of representation of pirates. We think of a pirate as a person, as a thing, but in fact the word ‘pirate’ is a political and a legal label. It’s something that people are called. There are very few – in fact I don’t think there are any examples of anyone unambiguously calling themselves a pirate, for obvious reasons; you don’t want to get executed. But it is also something that gets applied to you, and so that really has two dimensions. One is about the way that these myths of piracy develop, so even if no-one’s admitting to be a pirate, there’s lots of writing about pirates and lots of plays and ballads and pamphlets, and so the kind of popular representation of piracy is one interesting strand that I think has got a lot more attention.
And then the other strand is the political significance of piracy of these accusations. Law is really important to empire. Empire is about power, it’s about controlling, you know, exercising power over territories, and law is one of the ways that you do that. So, when you call someone a pirate, you are saying this kind of violence, this kind of maritime raiding, is illegal, it is illegitimate. But at the time, there are many kinds of legal maritime raiding by private ships, what we often now call ‘privateers’, although actually that word itself changes through this period and what it means changes, but all empires, all governments are dependent on private maritime raiding, are issuing licences to carry out private maritime raiding. So this is about making decisions about saying ‘my violence is okay, but your violence is illegal; mine is a privateer, but you are a pirate’, and that plays a really big role in relationships between empires in this period, the French Empire, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Mughal Empire in India, the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, and to an extent in the Indian Ocean.
And it also, as I said, plays a part in the role of international law, because a lot of the arguments are about who is a pirate that go into then developing a framework of law, a system of international law to agree, to decide, to regulate. So, at a very basic level, who is a pirate seems like a simple question, but I think, both in terms of the image of piracy that we have and where that comes from, and the political and legal significance of these arguments about piracy, have been areas the historians have been really particularly focused on and that I find very interesting.
[06.11]
Mike Gibbs: Reading your book, it seems to me that picking up on what you’ve just said, that there are two kinds, if you like, categories of pirate. There are the thugs and then there’s Jack Sparrow, you know, a bit of a character, one we all relate to. Which of those do you think is dominant?
Richard Blakemore: Well, again, this goes to what I was saying about representation. I think they are the same people. I think that there’s very clear evidence for extraordinary brutality amongst plunderers, amongst pirates, but also amongst people engaged in legal maritime warfare as well.
So, to take an example, Blackbeard, who is probably the most famous pirate in history, he spends ten years working as a privateer in a global war. Before the war ends, he’s now out of a job, he carries on raiding and he becomes a pirate, and so that kind of tells us a number of things. It tells us about how it’s the same people who, who are on both sides of the law, it tells us about how it’s not what they’re doing, it’s not maritime violence that makes them pirates. It’s the context, it’s whether it’s warfare or the legal side or who they’re doing it for that really matters.
But I also wonder about the experience. The experience of warfare, you know, desensitising people, traumatising people. Some of the violence and brutality of these pirates may well come out of the fact that they have been exposed to decades, in some cases, of warfare around the world, and so they continue to behave in ways that, during a war, are totally acceptable and indeed deemed heroic. So one description of Blackbeard says he would have been a hero if he had been doing it for the right reasons.
But then, to go back to the Jack Sparrow, Blackbeard is also an incredibly flamboyant figure in contemporary culture at the time. He is not, to my knowledge, called Blackbeard himself. I don’t think there is any source of him actually calling himself Blackbeard and certainly in immediate records, but he becomes depicted as this great dramatic flamboyant figure very, very quickly after his death, and that is part of the sort of development of this myth, this legend that we’re talking about as well, the speed with which pirates are celebrated. And even, as I said, Blackbeard is villainised in the contemporary text, but there’s also a kind of ‘well, he’s very bold, he’s very strong’, and quite a lot of pirates, as figures of representation, have that element of ‘well, they’re obviously very bad, but also we need military people to protect the Empire, we need heroes in some sense’, and some of them seem to have a kind of popular folk hero dimension as well in ballads, and songs, and other contexts.
So, I think as people, they were pretty much all thugs, or all involved in some really quite appalling things, but as legends, as representations, that layer also develops immediately in the period that we’re talking about.
[09.23]
Mike Gibbs: So you’re not trying to rehabilitate the pirate?
Richard Blakemore: No, certainly not! And I think it’s interesting that there are people who are. There’s a kind of ‘pardon William Kidd’ movement, William Kidd who was – I mean, he killed people and he stole stuff, but he claimed he was not a pirate, although he definitely captured ships that he was not supposed to have captured. I think the evidence on that is unambiguous. But he’s also executed for political reasons. He’s a scapegoat, to some extent, of political machinations that are going on in England in the 1690s and early 1700s, so again William Kidd, as a famous pirate figure, captures this. He is himself a violent and dangerous man, and on that level, I don’t think we have a lot of sympathy for him at all, but he is also not in control of his own fate because he is being used for imperial and political agendas. And I think that’s where some of this sympathy for pirates does come from, that idea, either that they’re kind of rebelling against things that we don’t like, like empire, or that they are somehow victims of imperial oppression which, to some extent they may be, but they are also involved in many of these things like imperial expansion and oppression that I think we need to recognise as well.
[10.36]
Mike Gibbs: And within the context of the re-evaluation of British imperial history that is very much current, what is the role of piracy and pirates in the growth of the British Empire as it subsequently became?
Richard Blakemore: Well, there’s a sort of broad dynamic we can speak about. They are absolutely essential. Maritime raiding, and especially private maritime raiding, including piracy, are absolutely essential to the expansion of the British Empire, also of the Dutch Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire. It’s a dynamic across all of these empires. But, broadly speaking, in the 1500s, Britain, or England and then later on – by the 1700s we’re talking about Britain – but in the 1500s, England is in support of private maritime raiding because it does not possess a substantial naval force and so, as a weapon of war, as a military technique, authorising your merchant ships to go out and attack your enemies, is effectively the best way, and the Elizabethan period is really defined by this.
Most of the maritime warfare taking place in the Elizabethan period is private maritime warfare. Elizabeth never even actually declares war on Spain, she just gives legal cover through letters to her merchant captains because of the legal system about maritime raiding that exists at that time. So, the Elizabethan period creates a myth of sea power, but that sea power is not necessarily the navy, it’s much more maritime raiding.
Then through the 1600s, as England begins to establish colonies itself in the Americas, many of these colonies are heavily dependent on plundering. Plunderers defend these colonies against indigenous American communities, against Spanish attacks. Many of these colonies are economically dependent on maritime raiders plundering the Spanish Empire, it’s a big business and places like Jamaica would not have survived its first few decades if it did not have an income from, basically, plundering the Spanish Empire.
And then later, as this Empire becomes more established, as the colonies become more established, as Britain becomes more involved in global trade, especially by the end of the 1600s into the early 1700s, Britain becomes more of a target for piracy itself. It’s now got a much larger merchant fleet, it’s now involved in trading in the Indian Ocean with the Mughal Empire. It’s now finding that all of these people it had supported, many of whom had served, British governors, colonial governors, the British Empire, during wartime, but when they are now attacking Mughal ships, which is upsetting the Mughal Emperor and threatening British trade, this becomes a problem. And so we see this shift from supporting, to an extent, or at least tolerating maritime raiding through the 1600s. There are some laws against piracy, there are moves to crack down on piracy, but it’s not very coordinated, it’s not very organised, but then this new situation where Britain is now threatened by piracy in the 1690s, forces the Empire to change tack – if we can fit in a maritime pun! – and so new laws are introduced.
There is more prosecution, new rules for governors, and that brings about a shift in the early 1700s where Britain is now kind of heavily involved in trying to suppress and prevent piracy. So, there’s a very interesting relationship where the Empire is totally dependent upon it, but also ultimately moves to try and to end it.
[14.02]
Mike Gibbs: So, it sounds to me from what you’ve just said that governments had a very ambivalent attitude to piracy.
Richard Blakemore: Yes, that is especially the case in the 1500s and the early 1600s. Elizabeth I issues laws against piracy, but that exclusively means anyone attacking her or her allies. She doesn’t prosecute any of her sailors for attacking people who are not her allies. In the 1650s/1660s, buccaneers in the Caribbean, so these are sort of semi-legitimate people living in places like Jamaica or Tortuga, off the coast of Hispaniola which later becomes the French colony of Saint-Domingue. These buccaneers were in French flibustier, in Dutch vrijbuiters, which means free plunderers. They are ranging around, attacking Spanish shipping, but often with commission from colonial governors.
And the legal status is quite curious, because it’s not entirely clear if the Governor of Jamaica is allowed to hand out these commissions; the King of England can, but whether the Government of Jamaica can. And that sort of creates the space in which they can operate. So, for example, Henry Morgan, the most famous of the buccaneers, gets all of his authority from the Governor of Jamaica. He and his friend, the Governor, are hauled back to England at one point because of the protests of the Spanish ambassador, but Morgan is never put on trial. He actually ends up going back to Jamaica as a Deputy Governor himself, so he’s able to operate in that space.
And then that’s really what changes, especially in the early 1700s, where the new laws, new approaches by governors, are starting to kind of cut down that space to operate in between the actual government law and the space where you can act. And also, colonial attitudes change.
In the early period, in the 1600s, as I have mentioned, colonial communities are dependent economically, tend to support piracy. This happens in Ireland as well as in the Caribbean and the Americas. But by the early 1700s, these colonies have become more economically established. Often they’ve become involved in agriculture such as sugar or rice or tobacco. Often that brings with it slavery because the labour demands for this agricultural production is enormous, so Jamaica and Barbados go from having a majority white population in the middle of the 1600s, to a majority enslaved population of African people or people of African heritage by the early 1700s. And then pirates become a security risk. If you are part of white minority who is trying to control an enslaved population, then pirates become a threat. So, the colonial attitude changing is also part of the why, by the early 1700s, you see a much more concerted move to crack down on piracy.
[16.50]
Mike Gibbs: And what was the role of piracy in the development of what we know today as the Royal Navy?
Richard Blakemore: So, it has an important role outside of the navy as a sort of supplementary auxiliary force, as I have said, throughout the 1500s and the 1600s. The navy is a relatively small force, it does expand dramatically in the 1650s and afterwards, which is partially to deal with piracy, but often as a combination. Many, many expeditions will combine private ships and naval ships.
But as the navy develops, as the navy is involved in larger wars, again, particularly the 1690s, the Nine Years’ War, which is a global war, a real expansion of the navy in that decade means that the states can rely less upon pirates. The navy is rarely actually involved that directly in anti-piracy measures. There are some expeditions, there is an expedition to Madagascar in the 1690s, there are naval expeditions in the Caribbean, but they, naval ships, are not actually well suited. Pirate ships are often smaller and faster and in fact, for example, when the Governor of Virginia wants to send someone after Blackbeard, he gets a naval officer and a naval crew, but he puts them in local colonial sloops, because the navy ships are too big to actually go into all of the inlets and the creeks where Blackbeard is hiding.
So the naval officers and sailors are involved in some of these expeditions. More especially, they are involved in convoying trade, and I think that’s one of the big shifts. As the navy expands and as more resources become available to convoy trade, we see a greater differentiation. So in the 1500s and 1600s, there isn’t much trade protection because the navy is too small, and so merchant ships are often carrying their own guns in order to protect themselves from pirates, but that means that you can also turn pirate relatively easily. Anyone on a merchant ship can become a plunderer or a privateer, or indeed, a pirate.
And that persists until the expansion of the navy starts to provide more convoys, particularly across the Caribbean, the Americas, the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean, and later on into the Indian Ocean as well. And that means you no longer need to protect merchant ships, so merchant ships tend to be less heavily armed, so you get more of a distinction between the kind of ships for fighting and ships for trade, so that again kind of pushes piracy a bit further away from legitimate activities because now, if you’re an armed ship and you’re not a navy ship, you’re much more suspect, whereas basically every ship was armed in the earlier period.
So it’s not a sort of direct link. There are naval expeditions against piracy, but the vast major of naval resources are being put into either protecting Britain or to protecting trade, but there is this kind of relationship that shapes the navy over the course of these centuries.
[19.35]
Mike Gibbs: Can we look at the social history of pirates and piracy? From where were pirates normally drawn? What’s their background?
Richard Blakemore: This is an area I find very interesting, because I consider myself a social historian, and the way I often start with this is that there’s no such thing as a professional pirate. So, to go back to this point that pirate is a label and the same people might be fighting in the navy, serving in the navy, serving in privateers becoming pirates.
So the vast majority of pirates are professional sailors. There are professional plunderers, people who spend their lives at sea, chasing cargoes, but they will occasionally be pirates, they will occasionally be working for privateers.
There are some locations that do seem to become particularly associated with plundering and piracy though, Jamaica, in the early 1600s, the regencies of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and the Kingdom of Morocco in the 1550s and the 1600s, the Caribbean islands like Jamaica and Tortuga, Madagascar. And what we see as a kind of congregation of, again, plunderers, some of whom are pirates, some of whom are trying to maintain – in fact, most of whom are trying to pretend they have a legal justification for what they are doing, but may not in fact actually have that, and these people congregate because those locations are near valuable trade routes – you can’t have pirates if you haven’t got any plunder to target, but they also tend to have a particular circumstance where they are outside of direct control. I have already mentioned this is the role of the colonial governors in Jamaica.
Ireland is in a similar situation. There are English colonies in southern Ireland, in Munster, which are not very closely directly controlled, and so you actually have a position in Ireland in the early 1600s where the colonial officials, the Vice Admiral of Munster and his associates, are simultaneously being told by London that their job is to suppress pirates while they are also trading with pirates, hosting with pirates, heavily involved in all of this industry.
Madagascar similarly is not controlled by any one empire, and in fact, there’s a very interesting history of the relations between Malagasy communities in Madagascar and pirate communities because there is some inter-marriage, there are some Malagasy leaders who are descended from pirates, and so there are places, locations, that seem to become, often for quite a brief moment, but a focal point for plunderers and pirates. But more broadly, it’s people who are involved in maritime trade, people who are involved in maritime warfare. Sometimes they go into piracy because they are mistreated, treatment in the navy can be quite harsh, treatment in merchant ships can be quite harsh. Sometimes they are colonial labourers, where again treatment can be quite harsh. Some people who are enslaved escape to join pirate crews, so piracy can be a route to freedom, although other pirates are clearly enslaving people and trading in slavery, so it’s a complex picture there. But it’s often people who are looking for a better opportunity, or who already have maritime skills, maritime resources, experience that they can bring.
Then just to add to that, another really important point here is the merchants, because many of the main episodes of piracy, like Ireland, like the Caribbean, like Madagascar, only occur because merchants are willing to trade. Pirates are often capturing commodities, they are only valuable if you can sell them, so you need trade, you need a black market. And this again is part of this trend that I talked about, where in the 1600s, many merchants are willing to deal with pirates, especially where there are Monopolies. The Spanish Empire tries to stop anyone else trading in silver, the Royal African Company tries to stop anyone else trading enslaved people. The India Company, the East India Company, tries to prevent anyone trading in Indian commodities like silks and spices. That drives prices up and so merchants are willing to invest in piracy or plunder in order to get goods at a cheaper price.
And often what we see, especially in the early 1700s, is laws change, trade opens up, there’s no longer these Monopolies, so the merchants lose interest in supporting illegal methods when they can access these goods. So it’s not just the sailors themselves, it’s also the kind of broader economic and political conditions that tend to lead to spikes in piracy.
[24.00]
Mike Gibbs: And in Britain, what was the attitude to pirates amongst the public?
Richard Blakemore: I think this is a really interesting part of the story, because, as we sort of hinted at, there are folk hero elements. Francis Drake, who the Spanish very clearly considered to be a pirate, is a great hero. In fact, there’s a biography of him published in the 1600s called The English Hero. I mean, it can’t get more blatant than that! And, in fact, when Henry Morgan is doing his thing against the Spanish, he’s often compared to Drake as well, and he is feted, he is celebrated.
One of the sailors who served with Morgan, Alexandre Exquemelin, who is possibly Dutch or French, but he publishes a book in Amsterdam about the buccaneers that are then translated into Spanish and English and German, and when that arrives and is not very flattering to Morgan, Morgan sues the publishers and people respond, writing defences of Morgan.
So, some of them are quite strongly associated with imperial expansion and with heroism and with success at targeting Spain as a traditional enemy, but then we get a later shift. Figures like Henry Avery, who captures a Mughal ship in the 1690s, William Kidd, who I mentioned, he’s Scottish which makes him suspect for the English audience and actually he’s vilified at least partially because he is Scottish. Then figures like Blackbeard in the earlier 1700s, after all of the changes that I’ve been describing, there’s still something of a folk hero about them.
Henry Avery, in some songs about him, is almost compared to Drake and kind of protests his patriotism, protests that he never attacked English shipping, so there are some of these strains of an image of a patriotic pirate that persist, but they are also portrayed as threatening, and the text, particularly one book called The General History of the Pyrates, which is published in 1724, and is probably the most important book ever published about pirates, that kind of walks this very fine line, because it’s sensationalising these pirates, it’s drawing an audience because of that. It does portray some of them in a way, for example, calling Blackbeard potentially he’d been heroic if he’d done the right thing, but it’s also very clear that these are violent, savage, dangerous, brutal people, and so that side of piracy seems, seems to become much more recognised in some of this literature.
And I wonder if it sort of depends upon your position. If you’re on a merchant ship being attacked by pirates, I don’t think you are very sympathetic to pirates! If you’re a woman in a colonial community who’s husband has just sailed to Madagascar – and we do have some surviving letters between these sailors and their wives, even from Madagascar, you know, professing their undying attention, their undying fidelity – then you’re probably quite supportive of, of what they are doing but you might not think that it’s piracy and you might ignore the more awful, brutal things that they happen to be doing as part of their careers.
[26.52]
Mike Gibbs: What brought the so-called golden age of piracy to an end?
Richard Blakemore: Yes. So this is part of that bigger story of the changes we’ve been talking about.
The way historians use the words ‘golden history’ is itself quite revealing. It originally was used to talk about the buccaneers in the 1600s – Henry Morgan – as a sort of golden age. And then it sort of shifted and mutated to now generally mean the early 1700s, which I think is a reflection of how important that moment in the 1700s is.
The buccaneers are commemorated in texts like Exquemelin’s book and in other depictions as well, but it’s really in the 1700s, there’s a surge of piracy, and there’s lots of depictions of piracy, there’s lots of debate about piracy, there’s expeditions against piracy. And in some ways, that is itself a result of the changes that have been going on, where the Empire has moved from supporting maritime raiding to being more strict about it, because these people might well have got away with being a privateer, with working on the edge of the law, but now there are new laws, now there are stricter positions, now the colonial governors are trying to take action, and so, in some ways, when this surge in piracy starts in 1713, I think the people who started it are just trying to carry on with what they were doing in a war that only lasted a few years before. But it quickly becomes clear that that is no longer possible, that the governments are going to respond, that they can’t hide with their old friends, and so they seem to escalate into this more radical dramatic, violent, unusual kind of piracy because they are pushed out into this edge beyond the law that previous pirates had not occupied.
And it’s ironic because that’s now the image of piracy, that quite unusual moment. The vast majority of maritime raiding through most of history has been involved in warfare, has been privateering, or at least has been people who would claim that they were privateering, and it’s only in the early 1700s that we get this moment when people actually seem to act and maybe even think of themselves as pirates. And so, it’s really ironic that that moment, because it’s so dramatic, has then become the image that when we think of pirates, that’s what we think of when in fact they’re quite unusual.
But what brings it to an end is a combination of factors. We talked about some of the naval expeditions and the private expeditions. Some of these pirates initially congregate in the Bahamas, and then there is again, not a naval, but a private expedition led by Woodes Rogers, himself a former privateer, to retake the Bahamas, and that kind of removes a base that the pirates were using, so that seems to be an effect upon them.
The prosecutions, although, as I’ve talked about earlier, only a minority are prosecuted and executed, it’s done very visibly, it’s done very publicly. The trial records are published and circulated. A really big statement is being made, and that may have an effect. People may become aware that actually, if you go into piracy, you’re running a much greater risk than you would have done ten or twenty years before.
There’s perhaps a natural attrition. You know, if people are dying at sea or people are dying through execution or in battle, then the numbers are dwindling, and, and you can’t sustain that through new recruits. And indeed, one of the really interesting dynamics in this episode of piracy is that by the later stages, by the 1720s, pirates are sailing around the Atlantic basically pressganging people from ships into piracy, and quite a lot of people are being forced into piracy. Now, maybe they say that at a trial because they want to pretend that they weren’t involved in piracy, but it does seem to be genuine in many cases and more so than in previous examples, so it really seems that in this moment, it’s only the most desperate, or the most violent who are remaining pirates and then they are forcing other people to recruit with them when they capture their ships. So that that kind of contributes to this natural attrition.
Then there’s also potentially economic factors. Some historians have interpreted piracy in terms of labour markets, so there’s a big labour market during the war because people are employed in the navy and in privateers. When the war ends, which is only a few years earlier, there’s, there are then massive surplus of labour, so some of those people end up going into piracy, and actually there’s an economic recovery after that and maybe people get absorbed back into legal maritime jobs. So there’s a number. There’s no one factor, there’s military and political campaigns, there’s executions and prosecutions, but there’s also attrition through death at sea and there’s possibly these economic factors which are drawing people back out of piracy.
And I think attitudes do change where people realise that, actually, if you’re going into piracy now, you, you’re, it’s not going to be a long-term career, so many people are being forced into piracy rather than choosing to go into it.
[31.24]
Mike Gibbs: Richard, thank you very, very much indeed for what has been a fascinating discussion. It’s certainly made me think well beyond Jack Sparrow and see the role and the importance, the significance and the effects of pirates and piracy in a totally different light. Thank you very much indeed.
Richard Blakemore: Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
[31.58]
Dr Blakemore’s fascinating book, Enemies of All: The Rise and Fall of the Pirates, was published by the History Press in 2024.
And you can find other podcasts on the maritime history of Britain in the seventeenth century on our website, www.worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk, as well as our Apple podcast and Spotify channels.
In one of these programmes, Dr Blakemore explores the life of one of Cromwell’s Generals at Sea, Robert Blake (1598–1657), of whom Admiral Nelson memorably said “I shall never be his equal”.
This fascinating programme is just one example of more than 100 podcasts freely available now from “The World Turned Upside Down”. Do explore our open access catalogue.
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