Female Speaker: Thank you very much, Frank. Our next speaker is Peter Earle, emeritus professor at the University of London, and he will speak on "The British Navy and the War Against the Pirates." He is the author of many, many books about British seamen, piracy, Henry Morgan, and his latest book is about the British Navy against the pirates. Peter. You may choose to sit there if you wish. Peter Earle: Good morning. It's very nice to be here in Washington. In fact, my latest book is on treasure hunting. My family say I am the world's leading expert in boys that are in history; pirates, treasure hunting, anything like that. Today I'm afraid I'm a bit of a killjoy because instead of being on the side of the pirates, like many of you, I'm on the side of the Navy today. And what I plan to show, briefly, of course, is just how the Navy achieved what Franklin Knight has just told you about; in other words, the demise of piracy eventually in the 1720s. The pirates then still existed. Even if there wasn't so much Spanish silver, they had a way of life which they wanted to maintain. That way of life was obnoxious to the powers that be in Britain and elsewhere, and they had to be destroyed. So this is a process that took quite a long time. As you have seen from both the previous papers, the British government, and indeed most European governments, were very mixed up in their attitude toward pirates; that on the whole they tended to agree that piracy was rather useful, and that it cleared the seas of Spaniards and other awkward people and made lots of room for the British to follow in with regular trading ships later on. So to start with, in the early 17th century the British government, the Elizabethan government if you like, paid lip service to the idea that piracy was a crime, which it always had been; that pirates were the enemies of mankind, that was the regular phrase, and that they should be destroyed. But I'm afraid that was just lip service; very, very little was done. The early phases of the campaign against piracy start really in the first two or three decades of the 17th century, and they were focused mainly against pirates in Southwest England, Devon, Cornwall, Ireland, South Wales; places like that. These were quite prolific in piracy, attacked ships in coastal waters and the western approaches to the British Isles and so forth. They didn't go very far, on the whole. And generally speaking, their activities were condoned in the same way as smuggling was to be condoned in the 18th century by the local people. Piracy was useful, it employed men, often the most difficult men who were rather glad to stay on a ship rather than in the village. It provided a market for people selling ships and things to do with ships, sails and so on, and of course it provided a flow of very attractive goods, very cheap, anything stolen. So, originally piracy was supported by the local gentlemen in these parts of Britain and Ireland. And the first thing that happens is that that is changed by direct policy from the central government. People, lords in these parts of the world who were active in the support of pirates were removed one way or another, and people loyal to London rather than to their localities replaced them, so that was an important issue. Secondly, there was a very small but significant increase in the number of ships supplied by the Royal Navy to actually patrol the coasts of England and Ireland, so there were some people looking for pirates. Not very many, I can assure you, but there were some. And finally, and most important, there was a change in attitude. As I said, in the 16th century, generally speaking, piracy was condoned as rather useful. But by about 1650 or somewhere around there you're getting the attitude, even among fairly ordinary people, not merchants and so on, that piracy is bad and something should be done about it. Now, I don't know why that happened. I mean, changes in attitudes of that sort are virtually impossible to prove one way or the other. But I always thought one major reason for the change was the growth of a new threat which is absolutely terrifying to people in England. So far we've seen the English as bad boys, but they were also victims, and the people to whom they were victims were the corsairs of the Mediterranean; Muslims who operated from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and also from the Atlantic coast of Morocco. These people are sometimes called the Barbary corsairs, sometimes just the Muslim corsairs. And suddenly in the first few decades of the 17th century their numbers grew enormously, for various reasons, like for instance, the Spanish policy driving out the Mariscos [ spelled phonetically ] and so on; a lot of those ended up on corsair ships. But also, the end of the Elizabethan wars threw out of work huge numbers of seamen; Dutch, English, you name it. And those people wanted to maintain their adventurous life. And some of them, as we have seen, went to the Caribbean to do so, but several of them went to Algiers or Tunis. These are people who had been Christians, and they turn into Muslims; they become, in fact, Barbary corsairs. And with them they take their ships and the maritime technology which had made Elizabethan seamen so successful to North Africa. So suddenly what had been a fairly small problem in North Africa becomes a really big one. And the ships from North Africa are cruising right across, but also into Ireland, into Cornwall, attacking villages, seizing people, taking them back. Typically, any ship captured by the Muslim corsairs, the crew and passengers were all sold into slavery, so it wasn't a very pleasant experience; far less pleasant than being captured by Calico Jack Rackham a hundred years later. He probably would be very nice and give you a drink. So that was the problem, and now what to do? How do you defeat these corsairs? The Muslim corsairs all operated virtually as the Navies of states -- Algiers, Tunis, places like that -- and they had powerful fortifications and they were very difficult to do anything much about. In the 1620s when they were at their peak, Algiers probably sent out every year over a hundred armed sailing ships full of men who were very dangerous. So this was something on a completely different scale than anything else that was happening at the same time. And because we tend to focus on the Caribbean nexus we're forgetting this, and the victims are partly the English, but not really. The real victims are Maltese, Greeks, Italian, and of course the Spaniards. The Spaniards get it wherever they are; in the Mediterranean from the Muslims, in the Caribbean from the English and Dutch. So anyway, after a lot of debate the English decided they had to do something about this, and they set out an expedition in 1620 as the first one to attack Algiers. It was an utter failure. They had absolutely no idea how to beat these people. They took the wrong ships, they had the wrong policy, everything. Then 15 years later Admiral Rainsborough went out and he attacked Sallee, which is the Moroccan port, which was perhaps the most dangerous of all the corsair ports. He had learned a few things by then. He realized that one of the main reasons that it was impossible to capture these chaps was that they could always get away. They had much, much better ships than anything the Navy could operate, and if there was no wind, they always had oars, not necessarily pulled by slaves, but the free men would take to the oar, like they did last night in the film, in order to get away out of trouble, and that's exactly what happened. So Rainsborough did take some oared ships, and they had a lot of success. And I focus on this because it's very, very important in the future attacks against pirates that they get the idea that you need a sailing ship of a particular sort. It's got to be slim, fast, shallow draft so that it can go into shallow water where the pirates always go, and that it has oars in addition to sails if necessary. So, nothing much happened in the first half of the 17th century. But after about 1650, really, you get a very considerable change in European Navies. Basically, they grew enormously in size. They had been very, very small. I mean, Elizabeth's Navy was very small, as you could see in the film, because she wouldn't pay any money to build one. And that was true, and James I was even meaner. So these Navies were very small. And the same is true, actually, of virtually all the countries. They had small Navies in the first half of the 17th century. After 1650 this changes, and you move into a period of nearly two centuries of the great maritime wars basically between the western maritime powers, Holland, France and England, and of course, Spain still playing a part, but not so important as she had been. Now, these Navies were built to fight each other, but of course they realized with so many more ships, when they weren't fighting each other -- and that did happen every now and then; there were a few years of peace when they weren't fighting France or Holland or so on -- when they could fight the Algiers or Tunis or Tripoli or wherever they fancied. So you get a whole series of wars fought by the English and the French mainly, but also to a certain extent by the Dutch in the second half of the 17th century. And these wars were basically successful. They learned how to defeat the Muslim corsairs, they took more ships which were suitable, they developed a system of tactics, they developed a system of convoy which prevented ships from being captured. And by 1683, which was the end of the last war between England and Algiers -- and that phase was really over as far as England was concerned, as far as France was concerned, and it's really interesting that this whole policy can be seen very much in the same way as the Caribbean policy was later on. Both the English and the French defeated the Muslim corsairs, but didn't destroy them. They made no effort to destroy them because they liked them to be there because they attacked the Spanish, the Italians, the Greeks and everybody else and left the Mediterranean open for the English and French, who became the major carriers of that sea. So, another form of what I call piratical imperialism. So in the 18th century, not much trouble for the English from Muslim corsairs, apart from Sallee, which was always a law under itself, and you get a few little wars with them. But Algiers and so on were at peace. They honored the treaties they made with England. They didn't capture English ships, they didn't enslave English people, and the French had the same thing going for them. And in fact, Algiers was a major ally of Britain in most of the 18th century, or was very useful, sort of based on the southern side of the Mediterranean when they were fighting France and Spain. So that was a good start, but just as the Muslim corsairs were being defeated, we move into the next phase, which follows very much from Franklin's paper. As he has shown very elegantly, there were reasons, by the late 17th century, why the old policy of what I just called piratical imperialism wasn't such a good one any longer. Trade had become more important than just seizing bullion. Trade requires peaceful seas. Pirates become anathema, and must be destroyed. And so the whole attitude in the ruling class begins to change. And this really can be dated to 1670 with the Treaty of Madrid, which we have seen -- sorry I haven't got any pictures. We could have left his up there. The Treaty of Madrid was a treaty of peace between England and Spain. Neither side obeyed every clause, but that doesn't really matter. You don't expect them to. But the attitude of the Treaty of Madrid becomes more and more state policy. So basically, piracy was condemned. The governors were instructed to call in their privateers to issue no more licenses, no more letters of marque, and to capture anyone who didn't obey these laws. And that starts in the 1670s. Now, naturally this didn't end in success immediately. This is just stuff on paper. Virtually nothing happened in the 1670s to implement this policy. Nobody wanted to execute pirates; they were normally friends of all the local people. In any case, they didn't have any ships to capture pirates. There was absolutely no naval protection provided in the colonies at all, except for a couple of ships of Jamaica. There were no ships to protect the North American colony. There were no ships to protect any of the other islands, so this is a policy without any force to back it up. Things begin to change in the mid 1680s, and they start beginning to take things a bit seriously. Jamaica now is provided with four royal ships, but that's, again, on paper because those four ships are not always working at the same time. But the idea was that Jamaica had four ships. Antigua and other islands had ships, and you had the very first beginnings of a royal naval presence in American waters based in Virginia and Massachusetts, so that's a beginning. This is in peacetime; they always had had ships in wartime. And the main function of these ships was quite clearly, if you read the orders to the captains, to chase pirates. That was what they were there for. Well, they didn't catch many pirates to start with, but at the very least, such activity tended to drive pirates out. I mean, if you're a pirate and there's a lot of Navy ships around Jamaica looking for you, then you go somewhere else, so you get the beginnings of piracy in West Africa and so on as a result of this. And also, you're beginning to get some pirates deciding, you know, it's not such a good thing after all, and every now and then the British government offer pardons. This is an old, old policy. It goes right back, to proclaim a pardon for any pirate that comes in before such and such a date, and he won't be prosecuted. And as long as they honor that, which they didn't always do, then the pirates will come in, quite likely allowed to keep their loot, so they had a wonderful time. They had three or four years at sea, captured lots of ships, had a lot of fun, pardon, in they go, you know, and they turn into a gentleman. I'm exaggerating a bit, but that sort of does happen. However, one has to admit that despite having more ships, there were still serious problems in capturing pirates. First of all, the ships tended to be the wrong sort of ships that the Navy had. They weren't very fast. They didn't have shallow draft. They weren't kept clean, and so on. Secondly, the Royal Navy captains were normally young men on their first command, had no idea where anywhere was in the West Indies, so naturally didn't know where all the creeks and little passages and whatever that the pirates used. And thirdly, it wasn't a very attractive service. I mean, you think when you capture a pirate you're going to make a lot of money as a Navy captain. That was very rarely the case. All you'll find is a few rotting cows and some rum on board, and not much treasure. That's the typical treasure on board a pirate ship. Well, so we get a start here, beginning to focus on eradicating piracy, not entirely successful, but a move in the right direction from the point of view of mercantilism, which you might call the new policy. But then it all comes to an end in 1689, when after only three or four years of the new policy England is at war again with France. And in America you call this something different, don't you? We call it King William's War, the war of the 1690s anyway. That war. And what happens when there is a war is all these people who were pirates suddenly become respectable, and they're granted privateering licenses, letters of marque, and they fight the French for a few years until the war is over, and that's exactly what happened. However, during this period of war a new attitude was quite clearly at work, mainly orchestrated by the Board of Trade, which was a body set up to find ways of improving trade, as we have seen. Now, this is what policy was about. More trade means more customs duty for the king, and it means a stock of [ unintelligible ] who can be used, pressed probably, into the Royal Navy in every war, so trade is a good thing from the king's point of view, and anything which encourages trade is a good thing. So the Board of Trade was set, amongst many other tasks, what to do about piracy. And there were eventually were three main seams that one can see here. First of all, in the Caribbean and in America, just as in Cornwall and Devon a hundred years before, the local people supported pirates. The governors were pro-pirate, all the local people liked the pirates because they brought goods in, provided employment, all the things I said earlier. So that was the first thing that had to change. And this change is quite drastic in this period from about 1690 through to 1705. A lot of the worst governors are removed from office and replaced by people who are loyal to the crown in England, and more than happy to do everything they can to put pirates down. So that's important. It's not complete, of course. I mean, that's a difficult policy to implement. Carolina, for instance, remains a weak place where anyone who is a pirate can get support right through to about 1720, and we see many West Indian islands, a lot of them in the same position. But that's the first thing. The second thing was the law. When a pirate was captured, which as I said so far was not very often, it was very unlikely that he would suffer the full rigor of the law, for various reasons. First of all, if he came up before a court in, say, Jamaica, nobody would convict because they're pals; you know, they were neighbors or that was a cousin or whoever, you know, so they wouldn't do that. Even if that didn't happen, you had enormous trouble in bringing witnesses in and all that sort of thing. So, normally what happened to a pirate if he was captured was he was either acquitted, or the whole thing collapsed or he'd just run away and it was all forgotten about. This changed forever in 1700 with the passing of a new law which made a court for trying pirates. It consisted, I think, of five or seven people, naval officers and local officials, and could be set up anywhere. So it was normally set up near where the piracy had been done, easy to get witnesses, and it was the sort of people who would find them guilty [ laughs ] . And when you think of it, nearly every pirate who was tried under this law had been captured in a ship which was armed, quite likely flying a black flag. I mean, they really were asking for trouble if they got captured, so they were found guilty. And although the people who made up these courts had some humanity -- I think one has to accept that; some of the trial transcripts have survived, and they took a lot of trouble to see if the people had been forced to serve against their will, and they took trouble, you know, to save young people and so on -- but basically, if you were caught they would persuade two of the crew to turn in king's evidence, "Yes, we were pirates," and the whole lot were in serious trouble and the ropes were brought out. So that was the second. And the third plank, if you like, in the new policy, was always in peacetime there would be a serious naval presence in the Caribbean and in the American Congo. This has already happened to a certain extent, but it was going to be properly enforced from then on. Well, just as soon as this new mix of things had been created, peace broke out. Does peace break out? Anyway, it happened in 1697, and immediately, piracy on a scale which had certainly not been seen since the early '60s in Morgan's time, was operating right through the Caribbean along the American coast in Africa and so on. And here you could see immediately the government, the admiralty and the Royal Navy leap into action. And it's quite amazing, really. You suddenly realize that they're serious, because they produced 24 royal ships, that's quite a lot, that were sent out specifically to hunt pirates in this period, around about 1700. These ships employed three and a half thousand men, according to my estimate; about twice the highest possible estimate of pirates in operation at that day. So this is serious stuff, but it didn't make a lot of difference because they still weren't too good at capturing the pirates. All the things that were in their favor before -- they knew the seas better, they had better ships, so on and so forth -- still existed. These 24 ships were not suitable for hunting pirates. They were too deep in their draft to go through shallow water. They weren't cleaned often. Everyone know what careening means? Cleaning the bottom of a ship in order to maintain its speed for the water. This needs to be done every two or three weeks in a place like the Caribbean, but the admiralty was very, very parsimonious about this sort of thing and just wouldn't pay. So you read a report from a Royal Navy captain, you know, "Couldn't catch him, the ship being foul," that was the word they used, and you know, there is Captain Jack, off in the sunset. So all those sort of things happened. Nevertheless, there were some successes as a result of this campaign. First of all, a simple naval presence was sufficient maybe to clear an area, but even to discourage some pirates from staying at sea at all. After all, the odds were slightly more likely to be captured after you got such a big naval presence. And this was given support once again by issuing pardons. So if you got a free pardon and it looks dangerous and you're a bit sensible and you have just captured something, you know, give up. And then finally, there were a few successes, and the greatest one, the first really big success in the war against the pirates was fought on the 3rd of May, 1700 in Lynnhaven Bay, Virginia, when Captain William Passenger -- who wasn't a passenger, it just happened to be his name -- in HMS Shoreham fought and captured the French pirate ship, La Paix. Now, this is quite an interesting little battle. These are quite big ships, but the pirate ship had about 150, 200 men and a stack of guns, about the same as the English ship. There's no doubt the pirates fought bravely, I think someone has already said that, but no one ever really accused pirates of being cowards. But the fact is that they lost the battle pretty easily, and the reason was pretty obvious, for they had absolutely no discipline whatsoever. They were brave, but they were individualistic and they were very reluctant to take orders or work as a team. I mean, that is exactly what you would expect, isn't it? Even in Queen Anne's day the crew of a naval ship was pretty well disciplined, well trained, and was particularly good at firing its guns. So I mean, La Paix was a long fight, but it was captured This is good news for the British government, and they made the most of it. About a fifth of the men on the pirate ship were actually killed in this fight, but the ones who survived were shipped back to London, where a few months after the battle the French captain and 23 of his men were tried, found guilty of piracy and hanged on the same day. Now, you may think that's what normally happened to pirates, but it wasn't. Generally speaking, if any pirate was condemned to death, most of them would be pardoned and just one or two would actually be executed, quite often by something really crude like the throw of a dice to see which one would suffer for the rest of his ship mates. So though this naval effort was inconclusive, one has to say that this is a step forward from anything previously that the Navy tried to do. But it didn't last very long, because once again we have war; 1702, England, France, Spain, all fighting again, and all those pirates, of course, become privateers again, respectable people with their letters of marque and so on. The war begins to drag to a close after 1710. It took a long time dying, this war, but everyone assumed that once it was over there would be a lot of pirates again. This actually did happen. From about 1715 onwards one gets a huge increase in the number of pirates operating. And many of them are operating from the Bahamas, which at that time was largely uninhabited. The Bahamas are being fought over during the wars and everyone just cleared off, basically, so they were empty and obviously a very suitable place for pirates. The numbers during this period have been estimated by Marcus Rediker. He estimates that there were about 2,000 pirates at sea in some 25 to 30 ships in the peak periods of what turned out to be the last great epidemic, if one can use that word, of pirates. And this is the period very often called the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1715 to 1726, something like that. And it's in these years after 1716 that nearly all those pirates flourished whose careers were written up in Captain Charles Johnson's famous book The General History of the Pirates -- Blackbird, Black Jack Bellamy, Bartholomew Roberts, [ unintelligible ] -- these may be names familiar, but the only ones most people know, apart from Drake, and they all come from this short period, and people only know them because they were in this book, which of course, every word was utterly true [ laughs ] . Well, the British were very reluctant to set out a whole lot of ships after pirates again after having fought a huge, long war, a very expensive one, but they were forced to, really by the merchants, the officials, even newspapers who appear for the first time really saying, you know, "Do something about it." So they had to do something about it, and once again the number of royal ships committed precisely to anti piracy were increased, and they reached a peak in the early 1720s when they were roughly the same as they had been in 1700, hen I mentioned there were 24 ships at sea. Now, the striking thing about this campaign is you would have thought that by 1716 that the British government, the admiralty, the Navy, the captains would know how to defeat pirates. They had been doing it several times. They had beaten the Barbary corsairs, they'd begun to share how to beat the pirates in the Caribbean in the '80s and again around 1700. Well frankly, they had completely forgotten what to do. So they continue to use the wrong ships, they don't clean them, all the things I said before. They send out people who don't know their way around the West Indies, and much more. And this is difficult to prove. I think they didn't really try very hard. You get that impression from reading some of their logbooks. So just to give some figures -- all this Navy presence, pirates are quite easy to beat if you can catch them -- no pirate ships at all captured in 1715. None at all in 1716. Just one success in 1717 when a ship and sloop were captured in the Virgin Islands, but the crews all got safely ashore. And the only real bad thing that happened to the pirate community in 1717 was the shipwreck of Captain Jack Bellamy in his ship the Whydah, which was wrecked near Cape Cod, with the loss of nearly a hundred men. That was a serious, serious blow to the pirates, but it could hardly be put down to the Royal Navy. So you know, nothing had been learned. This Navy incompetence was noted by Captain Charles Johnson in the book I mentioned earlier. "I say," he wrote, "tis strange that a few pirates should ravage the seas for years without ever being lit upon by any of our ships of war, when in the meantime the pirates shall take fleets of ships. It looks as if one was much more diligent in their affairs than the other." [ laughter ] Of course he hit it on the spot, but this is actually written in 1724, by which case -- I mean, nobody knows who Captain Johnson is. I would love to get into a discussion about that, but we'll just call him Captain Johnson. I refuse to call him Defoe, because I don't think he was Defoe. But anyway, in 1724 he should have known better than to write that because it wasn't true any longer, but it was certainly true of the early years of the campaign, as I said. But it was just then, in 1718 onwards that things began to change. First the government reverted to the age-old policy of pardon. It was always a good trick, pardon. It cost absolutely nothing. A bit of paper, send it out to the colonies, and a few pirates always come in. You know, some will go back, like a cat to his vomit, I think is -- in fact, I think it was Woodes Rogers who said that. But pardons nearly always reduced the total number of pirates to a certain extent, so that was useful. The second string in 1718 was to recapture the Bahamas, and that was Captain Woodes Rogers, now of course, as we have seen a respectable man, given what was quite a difficult job to do. He was sent out there with very, very little support in the face of, you know, a thousand pirates, a lot of pirates, you know. He could have had serious trouble. But the fact is that when he sails in there with the royal commission, royal ship, the pirates on the whole thought, well, you know, bugger it, let's surrender, you know, let's go away, not fight him, you know. So he captures the Bahamas, and the capture of that base was quite a serious blow to the pirates. It wasn't absolutely devastating, since there were other places, and since it is about this time that you get what's known in the pirate literature as the pirate round. This basically means that the pirates never went to port. They just spent all their time at sea going from place to place; they didn't need a base. But it was a start to capture the Bahamas. However, although most of the pirates didn't accept the pardon and perhaps became even more piratical than they had before, this really does mark the beginning of the end. And I'd say 1718 really sees the piratical way of life at its peak in terms of the legends associated, ones which you probably carry as part of your mental baggage, because after that it changes. One of the very big changes, up to 1718 the failure of the Navy to capture pirates -- I spelled out, you know, three or four years in a row when virtually no pirates at all were captured -- made the occupation very attractive to seamen. If your merchant ship was captured, you didn't like the captain, or more likely you didn't like the work, and somebody said, "Well, join us. We've got plenty of food, plenty of drink, we're going to sail towards the sun." So they flock, you know, and whole crews abandoned their ship and flocked to the pirate flag. Once the Navy started being successful, then the pirate captains found it much more difficult to recruit men to serve on their ships, and this really starts in 1718. Blackbird is killed in 1718, Rackham is captured, and one or two other things happen. People begin to have doubts, refuse to join pirate ships. So some of them are forced to sign the articles of the pirate ship. In fact, you get pirates, maybe 10 of a crew are forced, they get their ship mates who weren't forced to take back a declaration that they had been forced to sign the article, and these are published in English newspapers, you know, so if they come up for trial they have got some evidence of their innocence. But of course, you know, a pirate crew with forced men isn't what you really have in your mind, is it? I mean, they're free loving people and are dangerous. You know, I mean, say you've got a hundred men and 20 or 30 are forced men, first of all, they're not going to fight very hard. Second, they may betray you, and in some cases pirate ships were actually recaptured by the forced men and brought into port, and the pirates were brought to trial. So that was a bad thing. So I'm going emphasize this year as a turning point. The pirate threat still had a few years to run, and in fact the extinction was delayed by a short war against Spain, which no one has ever heard of, in 1719 and 1720, sometimes known as the War of the Quadruple Alliance. I suspect you all know exactly what happened in that one. But basically what it meant was that ships in the West Indies, Navy ships, went back to fighting Spaniards instead of looking for pirates, you know, so there was a break, as it were. I have forgotten exactly how long it lasted, but it only lasted probably less than a year, that war. And once it was over, the balance definitely swung in favor of the Navy in this campaign. We find it at last taking advice which they had been bombarded with for years. More suitable ships were being employed, the sort I have described, many of them fitted with oars. These are not like those galleasses in that film, which were the most clumsy things I have ever seen in my life. These are slim things that you can actually move with an oar, and the oars are pulled by free men, not by members of the crew. So those are being fitted, and they're being cleaned much more. And that means you only get this, but not the next bit. And then finally I would emphasize once again by reading logbooks and correspondence and so on that it seems that the Navy captains sent out in the early 1720s were of sterner stuff than those employed in the early years of the campaign; more prepared to follow pirates to the bitter end, not just to sail around the island and come back and say "No pirates," which is what they used to do, not downhearted by the frustration which was a normal feature of cruising after pirates. So they got lots of successes after that date. Some were fairly trivial, but they constantly are cumulative. We're only talking about 2,000 pirates at their peak, you know, so it didn't take many successes to make a big dent. Pretty soon people realized that piracy, by the early 1720s, was a bad career choice. And on top of this sort of whittling away, there were a few major victories which rang around the maritime world that must have made every pirate tremble, and the most famous of all occurred in February 1722 when Captain, later Sir, Challoner Ogle and HMS Swallow cornered Bartholomew Roberts, who was the greatest pirate of that date on the African coast. Roberts and his consort, a second ship under his command, tried to evade the powerful naval ship, but both were brought to battle in separate actions; a double Navy victory which led to a whole of 285 pirates dead or captured, and of those numbers captured, 52 were hanged later at Cape Coast Castle in modern Ghana, so this is the biggest single defeat ever inflicted on the pirates. And in the maritime world, the news zooms around quite fast, and people think, oh, perhaps piracy is not such a good idea. Once again these pirate ships are captured very easily, without a single royal sailor being killed, which was quite shocking, really, because I mean, this Roberts had a fantastic reputation as a fighter. But not a single royal sailor was killed in capturing those ships. Once again it was a question of discipline, accurate firepower, but there were other problems. The number of forced men aboard Roberts' ships was important; many of them hid rather than fought. And also, more than one observer said that the pirate crews were so drunk that there could have been no order or conduct amongst the men in an engagement. And plenty of free drink was, of course, one of the major attractions of piracy, but I don't really agree with their use of it. It didn't really help in this sort of fight. It's okay for being brave, but it's not any good for fighting a single ship when discipline, firepower and so on are what are important. The other major naval victory occurred some 16 months later off of Long Island, New York in June 1723, when Captain Solgard of the HMS Greyhound fought two pirate ships under the command of the notorious Ned Low. And the most significant aspect of this engagement was that the Greyhound was what was described as a raring six rate. It's fairly small for it to be with oars, and the wind was very light and they rode up between the two pirate sloops and engaged the pirates. The royal Navy ship was in such good order that they actually catch them So, basically these two naval victories ended what's been called the Golden Age of Piracy. The odds were now clearly against the pirates, and most of them quietly slipped to shore, meaning that the few ships that remained were seriously undermanned. And these few ships were hunted with a persistence that showed a quite different spirit and discipline than in early years. The crew of HMS Winchelsea spent three weeks in the uninhabited island of Tobago sending out daily search parties to hunt for the few remaining members of a pirate crew. And similar determination was shown in other places, including the bay islands of Honduras. This mopping up exercise continued to the end of 1726, by which time it's fair to say that the Golden Age of Piracy, the one that we normally associate with all the things that we think about piracy, had finished for good. Some 30 years after, a determination to achieve this had been definitely adopted by the British government. Little mercy was shown. Marcus Rediker has estimated that no fewer than 400, and probably 500 to 600 Anglo American pirates were executed between 1716 and 1726; a colossal number, even in an age notorious for its love of the gallows. This might seem to be overkill. I'm sorry, that's a bad pun [ laughs ] , but it was certainly effective. Very few sailors even thought of turning pirate in the face of efficient naval patrols, and the near certainty of retribution after this period. And as a result, there was actually no piracy at all for two and a half centuries from the 1720s to the 1980s, with one exception which you're not going to get now, in those areas where it had previously flourished -- the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the Western Indian Ocean -- and this despite a huge increase in the maritime trade on which piracy preyed. Piracy still throve in the South China Sea; still does in fact. But elsewhere it was over. And it really does show that it was possible to remove this scourge of the seas, but not without very considerable expense and effort and a firm commitment to the policy. And it wasn't until those conditions had been achieved from the 1690s and put into effect from 1718 onwards that what was desirable to the British government was achieved. Thank you. [ applause ] Female Speaker: So, I will ask the first question. I'm just very surprised that the British Navy did not clean their ships properly. [ laughter ] That's something that I -- Dr. Franklin Knight: He was talking about the under part of the ship, not on board. Female Speaker: Yeah, I know that. But I mean, how would the pirates have had the skill and the technology to clear the barnacles on the under part? They had better technology? Peter Earle: The fact is that it cost money to careen it and take everything out of the ship, tip it on its side, clean it, put it back. It cost money, and the admiralty were unbelievably parsimonious. That's not the only example, but it's the best example for the lecture. It made them totally ineffective as fighting machines. Female Speaker: I think all three presentations were just wonderful, and they worked out so well and were adopted into one another, and I would like to have the audience ask questions. Carol Armbruster: I would like to go back to -- Male Speaker: Your name, please? Carol Armbruster: Carol Armbruster, a French specialist here at the Library, so I'm quite interested to see where the French come in, in this. I would like to ask both of you about the definition of the corsair. I have seen it in the work I'm doing as something of a synonym for privateer. However, there are the specific corsairs of the Mediterranean which involves the Muslim world with the European powers. So just what exactly is a corsair? Peter Earle: It's just the French word for privateer, yeah, you're right. Carol Armbruster: That it is right? Peter Earle: In Italian it's corsado [ spelled phonetically ] . Dr. Franklin Knight: Yeah, it actually is used way back in the 12th century already, for trade. Carol Armbruster: Right. I understand the Latin and the old Italian derivations, but sometimes I understand some corsairs being specifically, how should I say it, conveying a Mediterranean context as opposed to more, you know, the Atlantic context, but that's not your view of it? Dr. Franklin Knight: No. Actually, you see the word used even in the North Sea. Carol Armbruster: But that's the other thing, with the French and the English. Dr. Franklin Knight: It's always applied where people are acting illegally against trade, whether they are overland trade or maritime trade Carol Armbruster: But privateer, so they do have those letters of marque, or they're supposed to. Male Speaker: Yeah. Peter Earle: I think it's used in two ways; as an exact legal description of someone's status, because they do have a commission, but also as an [ unintelligible ] . We do the same, you know, with our use of words. Carol Armbruster: Thank you. Female Speaker: Identify yourself. Barbara Tenenbaum: I am Barbara Tenenbaum, I'm the Mexican specialist, but this is a musical question. Did I hear you correctly that Drake had musicians on board his ship? Female Speaker: Yeah, well, it's very interesting because he didn't leave like a journal or something written, but some others that came after him wrote about his deeds and what he had in his ships, and they were the ones that record that he had chamber musicians; that the ship was really decorated and very fancy. So it's not registered by himself, but the other pirates that came later. Barbara Tenenbaum: Sounds like the golden highness [ spelled phonetically ] seen by Cunard, but -- Peter Earle: It was quite common for Navy ships or ships to have music on board. I mean, Bartholomew Roberts -- Dr. Franklin Knight: A floating court. Peter Earle: -- had a whole pack of them. Jerry Greenwood: A question. Jerry Greenwood, a reader of pirate history. I have heard that some were egalitarian, and that they divided their spoils quite equally, the cook getting a two share. Considering that they were always at sea, didn't have a home base, probably -- I can't find any logs -- how do we know fairly accurately what life looked like on board a pirate ship? Dr. Franklin Knight: Actually, there are lots of descriptions of life on board pirate ships, especially out of the Caribbean and especially at the end of the 17th century. And there have survived a number of these agreements. Usually it's not fair to say they lived always at sea. They were always land based. They went out on specific expeditions, and it was an elaborate agreement when they came as -- it's a floating association, and even though someone, or the crew would stick with a particular leader if he's successful, they were freelancers in the true and original sense of the word and abandoned regularly one leader for another. But they were not egalitarian in the sense of Democratic egalitarianism. They were formal in terms of the rewards of the enterprise. And I might say this is the same type of agreement, it corresponds very closely to what the conquistadors had; that is, if you had a horse and a conquistador you got a share and a half of the loot because the horse is entitled to a half. And if you lost a limb, there was a varying reward for your limb. And I can't remember what happened if you didn't survive, your portion. I think it went to the captain or something. I don't remember that part. But there are quite a lot of records of that. Female Speaker: And actually, Woodes Rogers had a previous agreement before he left, and they specified how they were going to share the booty when he will come back. And they had like a very long disagreement about the booty, what kind of shares were they going to have after he came back to England. So they did that, and it's very curious because in that agreement it said that they need to have captain consults for everything; for any attack or any action that they will take, they have to have this previous agreement, so a consult, a meeting among the captains. So they have these kind of agreements before even they leave on their missions. Dr. Franklin Knight: There are lots of records of Morgan, actually, who was a stickler for dividing things and cheating people. And one of the things he insisted was that after every enterprise everyone had to be searched that they weren't hiding anything, and he would dramatically be the first to be searched even though he was the head of the expedition. Elizabeth Graham: I have two questions. My name is Elizabeth Graham, and I actually teach at UCL in London, but I'm here at Dumbarton Oaks and I'm a Maya archeologist. But I have worked in Belize on historic sites, and that's what's got me interested in interaction between pirates and native peoples. And the two questions I had -- and you might have said this, Dr. Knight, about the boucon [ spelled phonetically ] -- is that a native practice that the seafarers adopted, or did they bring the practice of air drying meat from the Old World? Dr. Franklin Knight: I'm not quite sure. It was a practice in the Caribbean among the eastern sedentary [ unintelligible ] population; the so-called Caribs, as a form. Elizabeth Graham: I wondered, because the Maya did it as well. Dr. Franklin Knight: Not of pork or beef, but usually of lizards. Elizabeth Graham: Fish? Dr. Franklin Knight: Lizards, maybe fish, but mainly of the meat kind. Elizabeth Graham: See, that's interesting. And the other thing that really just means the environmental impact of pirates, because you mentioned their practice of letting cattle loose on the islands, and it is interesting that so many of these grazing animals were present on uninhabited islands, and of course, introducing grazing animals to the New World was probably the worst environmental disaster. And yeah, I know of no one who has really dealt with pirates as being, you know, so significant, which seems to be the case. Is that correct, or -- Dr. Franklin Knight: Well, I would modify. The pirates are the beneficiaries of this policy. This was really a policy which has antecedents. It goes back to the 13th century already, when they're just moving off the Mediterranean islands of doing this. When the pirates come in, in fact, already by the 1530s, Hispanola is overrun with wild pigs and cattle, and usually mules because they would throw donkeys overboard, and horses; the mules, of course, not capable of reproducing themselves, the result of the union of others. And this was found to be a very good policy because it then relieved the weight that you needed to carry, and you could replace that with water. Elizabeth Graham: Well, I'm not saying that it was bad for the pirates. It was bad for the native peoples and for the environment, and it happened a lot earlier than we think, and I'm wondering -- one of the things I thought about is that not settlers so much, but pirates may have been responsible for the spread of grazing animals, who of course didn't exist in the New World before, and the grazing animals -- Dr. Franklin Knight: No, no, but the point I'm making is that the pirates were benefiting from this. I haven't found an account of pirates. By the time the pirates are up and going, cattle and pigs especially are proliferating wildly. When Jamaica is captured in 1655, the few thousand, 5,000-plus British troops, to improve their status, spend a lot of time trying to kill off all the wild cattle so that they could be taken off the island. And they're quite unsuccessful in this; it's like deer in the United States. Elizabeth Graham: So you're saying the cattle got there by settlers and not by pirates? Dr. Franklin Knight: Yeah, by the initial explorers. I mean, Bermuda is a classic example. In 1609, Bermuda is uninhabited, but completely overrun by European animals, and all from the original dumping by -- Elizabeth Graham: Because I got the idea from a researcher named Rick Wilk, who has written a book on pirate cuisine, called Home Cooking in the Global Village, and it was from him that I read that seafarers deliberately kept cattle on the boats and then let them loose. So I don't know, I just thought it was interesting. I don't want to dominate -- Peter Earle: I think it was in the orders to Spanish captains in exploring islands, when they found an island to put animals on it. Male Speaker: Yeah. Yes. Elizabeth Graham: But I mean, how do you know that pirates didn't do it as well? I got it from Wilk's work that they deliberately also introduced cattle to islands where no one was living. Peter Earle: Yeah, but they never knew when their ship might be -- Elizabeth Graham: Oh, yeah, yeah, I was just thinking about the impact on native peoples, for example -- Peter Earle: Well, they weren't really interested in native peoples. Female Speaker: Can I go back to the [ unintelligible ] afternoon panelists? The question of terminology, because in Spanish, the Spanish use corsario [ spelled phonetically ] for all pirates, playing up on the religious differences -- heretics, Protestants, Calvinists -- but there's another term that they use, filibustero [ spelled phonetically ] , freebooter, that wasn't on the list, and I'm wondering if there's a nuance, difference, or it's used as much in English, because in Spanish, after the 1650s it really is the term used. Peter Earle: I didn't hear the term. Dr. Franklin Knight. Freebooter. Freebooter. Female Speaker: Filibustero. Female Speaker: It may come from the judge, it may come from -- Dr. Franklin Knight. Yeah, I was going to say that I haven't really paid as careful attention as I should to this, but I think this comes into the vocabulary from the Dutch, who more tend to use this freebooting, and from their free cities type of operation. But it is used synonymously in the early period, like most words, until it generates a sort of particularity or it loses fashion. In French and Spanish documents you find corsair used more often than any other term. Female Speaker: Yeah, and I have to say that for the Pacific the most common name is corsario and buccanero [ spelled phonetically ] at the end of the 17th century. Filibustero is not very common in the Pacific either. They refer to the filibustero, to the buccaneers in the Caribbean. Dr. Franklin Knight: And in the Caribbean, the term actually comes from the United States in the 19th century more than anything else [ laughs ] . Male Speaker: This is Arthur Dunkelman [ spelled phonetically ] . I'm the Kislak curator, and there's a curious document in the collection I'd like anyone to comment on. It's a very early document. It's a document that's signed by Pedro Menendeza Ovulace [ spelled phonetically ] , and it's sailing orders to a General Orasso [ spelled phonetically ] , who is guiding the treasure fleet back to Spain. This is early on, 1572, and he's warning his General that he should proceed to a certain point in the Azores before proceeding on, waiting for further orders, because that's where the corsarios are lurking, in the Azores, so it's much closer to home than most of our popular conceptions of the pirates, you know, kind of cruising the Caribbean Sea. In these early days, at least, it would seem that they're really lurking much more closer to the European coast than the American coast. Peter Earle: I think you would expect them to be, because they were based in Europe, they weren't based in the West Indies. Those ships waiting in the Azores would have come from Plymouth or something, and would spend a season there to try and capture the treasure fleets and then go back to England. I mean, the difference really occurs after the capture of Jamaica, when you get people actually staying in the West Indies, in the Caribbean. So I mean, the whole of that Atlantic coast of France and Spain and the Azores were patrolled by English and French ships, and it was just one of the things they did. Much easier, really, than looking for Spaniards in the Caribbean. Dr. Franklin Knight: And as Peter pointed out, this is really a big problem in Europe, in the ports. I mean, this is a Mediterranean and North European problem. What makes it dramatic in the Caribbean and bringing it into Europe is the fact that you're collecting bullion of such vast quantities, unimaginable before. I mean, Drake's haul astonishes all of England, and that's just one ship. Female Speaker: Just one more question on those corsairs, about the 19th century usage of this, because that's actually what I have been seeing a lot of, and it does involve the North Americans using corsairs. But also, I came across a reference recently to a declaration that was part of a Treaty of Versailles about this 1845 declaration among European powers; no more pirateering. And again, I would like to hear more comments extending into the 19th century, this use of the term corsair, and the Europeans are continuing their privateering obviously well into the 19th century. Dr. Franklin Knight: Well, they're still doing it today. Female Speaker: Yeah, well. Dr. Franklin Knight: That wouldn't surprise me, but I think as Peter says, it's really a marginal affair rather than a principal activity, and certainly after somewhere in the 18th century when it's declared by international agreement, I don't think that any state -- I was just trying to remember if there was any state that supports it as an activity; that is, the letters of marque, and you don't have that. Peter Earle: The United States did. Female Speaker: Yeah. Dr. Franklin Knight: Well, but the United States says it's neutral trade. That's the difference. And what the United States is doing is a little different, and it reflects also the difficulty of conducting piracy. Piracy is very successful when you're getting valuable commodity that pays the freight and is easily vendible or transferable. Once you get into the age of mercantilism, you have commodities which have to be distributed in a market. It requires a network. It's like fencing things or laundering money. You have other institutions, and that is not the easiest way for them. They want to just get gold, silver, or something that's readily disposable in the town that they hit. So I would say in the 19th century I haven't -- and actually I haven't been looking for it -- run into the term corsair in the 19th century at all, because it's so rare. Peter Earle: [ Unintelligible ] the Napoleonic wars, the French -- Dr. Franklin Knight: In the Mediterranean, because of course the Barbary pirates continue well into the end of the 19th century, and the Mediterranean still harbors them and there's still galley slaves until 1815, the end of the Napoleonic wars in the Mediterranean. Female Speaker: Actually, I have found a lot of documents for the Pacific, the beginning of the 19th century after the Treaty of San Lorenzo at the end of the 18th century, the North American whalers and corsairs going to the Galapagos Islands, and a big issue for the latest Spanish authorities to get rid of these whalers that were wandering around the Galapagos saying that they were in the trade mission or looking for whales, but they were really contraband, so they called them corsarios and balleneros; corsairs and whalers. Female Speaker: I have a question for Sabrina. With all of this business of leaving cattle and pigs on islands, they didn't leave any on the Galapagos, did they? Female Speaker: Actually they did, and that was a big issue because now and then the Spanish authorities, they really neglected the Galapagos Islands, but now and then they'd send like a ship to kill the cattle of the Galapagos, because the Galapagos was a base for the pirates, especially at the end of the 17th and first decades of the 18th century. But the Spanish authorities now and then used to send a ship just on a mission to kill the cattle or any living animal that they found there. But what they would supply with was turtles, the turtle meat. They used to stock their supply with turtles and then go on towards the north. Female Speaker: I have a question about the makeup of the British Navy versus the pirate Navies. In reading Marcus Rediker, my impression is that the British had to impress manpower and force people to serve, so to speak, whereas the pirates, they were volunteers, so they would be more motivated. Is that a fair question? Peter Earle: Essentially wrong. The British impressed people during wartime, and as I just said it was during peacetime they were fighting this war against the pirates, when the pirates were actually impressing people because they hadn't got enough men. Dr. Franklin Knight: Especially doctors. Peter Earle: Yeah, well, doctors, carpenters, any sort of specialists, but just men sometimes, you know, they really didn't have -- you know, they had sometimes quite big ships which needed, you know, a lot of people, and they didn't have enough. Male Speaker: Stephen Pataik [ spelled phonetically ] , would-be pirate. Just two minor points of information. The Barbary corsairs technically were privateers because they had commissions from the local rulers in Algiers and Tunis. Now, Christian states refused to recognize them, but in their mind they were doing something legal. To my knowledge, the last use of privateering is by the Confederacy, and the United States government made it very plain that these people would be treated as pirates. Peter Earle: On the first question, you're absolutely correct. I mean, no Muslim corsair sailed without a license from his ruler. And there were several Christian analogs; Malta, Spain, the kingdom of Naples all issued licenses to Christian corsairs to attack Muslims, and this is what was perceived as the Holy War. So it's the same with Spain, isn't it? We have seen that before. Male Speaker: One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Female Speaker: That's right. Male Speaker: Yeah. Male Speaker: Even today. Female Speaker: Even today, that's right. Female Speaker: I'm Yolanda Shipman [ spelled phonetically ] from International Trade and Communications Corporation. I have an observation. It's very interesting that the activity of piracy is still practiced, but it has taken on a different dimension because now we are in the electronic age, and it is electronic piracy. And I wonder then if the laws that existed then are the legacy that we have in the law against piracy, like we have the Napoleonic law that goes back so many years. Sabrina Guerra: I think that goes in this vision of illegitimacy about piracy. Piracy is not totally sanctioned. They need pirates sometimes, they use piracy, so I think as we speak here today, they just come and go. They transmutate. They're not totally illegal, and I really recommend you go and visit the streets in South America and you will see pirated movies and DVDs, and everything is piracy there. Everything is pirated, but it's not totally sanctioned. I'm going to talk today about -- people said, people in Latin American quitos [ spelled phonetically ] , they said, well, why should I pay for a movie $13 or $15 or $20 when I can buy a pirate movie for $2 in my economy, so nobody really sanctions piracy even today. Female Speaker: [ Inaudible ] in the street. Dr. Franklin Knight: Well, laws about piracy still exist. The metaphorical use of it that you're alluding to is intellectual property rights, and that's what's involved in the illegal duplication of things, but not just in videos and stuff like that. Look at the celebrated case of McLaren Enterprises and Formula One. That's a case of piracy for which they just paid a sanction of a $100 million, which is no small potatoes, and Raino [ spelled phonetically ] just escaped. And the interesting explanation, because they did virtually the same thing, that in McLaren they were almost champions, but in the case of Raino it didn't significantly affect the championship. So, one got away scot-free and the other one got sanctioned a $100 million. Female Speaker: Sylvia, one last question? Male Speaker: Yeah, my name is Andy Bestrom [ spelled phonetically ] , another would-be pirate. Dr. Franklin Knight: We all are. Male Speaker: Yeah. There's a kind of now obscure field of law called quitiem [ spelled phonetically ] law where -- I want to follow-up on the Confederacy issue, where actually U.S. naval vessels could take prizes, and even the lower ranks could actually unite in a legal action against an officer that didn't want to take a prize, and they had a quitiem right to say "We should have taken that prize." As piracy is ending, do you ever see competition between naval officers who want to take prizes telling politicians "Don't give out letters of marque because we want those ships," like, "We can kind of finance our own estates," or anything? Is there any competition in the official field of privateering, or something with administrative structures? Can you see anything like that in documentation, or no? I'm sorry, the question is a little bit vague. The structure of a Navy trying to displace privateering or trying to displace letters of marque, can you remember seeing that? Peter Earle: You have got to remember that the Navy, their own ships also captured prizes, and they were shared between the captain and the men. You didn't have to be a privateer. So there was some sort of competition, if you like, between a Navy ship and a privateer, which a Navy ship was likely to win; it was a much stronger ship. Male Speaker: Right. But do you ever see the Navy guys getting hungry and saying, "Look, don't let people have letters of marque because we want to do it, we want to do that work"? Peter Earle: No. Dr. Franklin Knight: No, I think Navy ships, in times of war they have to follow the rules of the admiralty court, so they have to have adjudication. They didn't always do it, and they could of course make their own courts, but they did represent the state, and that is the difference. Pirates represented themselves, except for specialist groups of pirates in the Mediterranean. I have always said the crusaders are pirates. I mean, they quickly lost. And you look at all the big Crusades, or at least the four successful ones, they didn't go to the Holy Land for any religious purpose. They went there for loot. If you look at the orders of the knights, Ritter, [ unintelligible ] , the German knights that spread Catholicism into Central Europe, they were fighting the Popes, the representatives, so again, having Papal permission to spread religion and fighting the Pope over the spoils of conquest is something else. So I think that there is a difference at that level between the informality of piracy, or should I say the locality of piracy, and the recognized international playing field in which the emerging nation-states are operating. And I think that explains some of the transitions in piracy, because as they go from semiformal activities, the more established the state becomes, the more it has to play by organized rules, and the English are particular. Under Elizabeth, she was very weak, and the only way she could get rich -- and she also loved baubles and these sorts of things -- was to have these guys go out and get it on the sly. And there's nothing really wrong with that to please your Queen. But once England became important, then that was not the way to get it, because at that time people brought it and presented it as gifts, or you could tax the people and purchase it. Female Speaker: Thank you very much. We shall reconvene here at 2 o'clock. [ applause ] [ end of transcript ]