among the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish navies in times of hot and
cold war and at all times among privateers and pirates. Not only the richly
laden Spanish treasure ships that made up the flotabut even humble barks
were targets. The 45-ton Tygrewas captured for its sails, anchors, hour-
glass, compass, and provisions on its way to Virginia in 1621.
Within thirty years after Columbus had arrived, French privateers were
savaging Spanish fleets—and not only the fleets. As these privateers grew
bolder, both they and the English began to sack cities. The most spec-
tacular raid was Jacques de Sores’s 1555 sack of the great Spanish city
of Havana. Even relatively peaceful trade sometimes faded into piracy
when better terms might be extorted by threat. The Spanish word rescates
summed up the transaction: it meant both barter and ransom. Even in times
when England and Spain or France and Spain were at peace, their agents,
both privateers and pirates, engaged in dirty tricks and casual mayhem.
The hand that held out goods for trade easily strayed to the hilt of the
sword.
Many hands held those swords. No reliable estimates exist for the
numbers of pirates in the seventeenth century, but during the first half of
the eighteenth century about 5,000 were active in the Atlantic. Some of
these outlaws were corsairs sailing out of North African ports. They are
usually called “Turks,” but their crews and even their commanders were
often European outcasts, then called renegadoes.Nearly half were English
or colonial American. The pirate world was polyglot and truly interna-
tional: its frontiers were not fixed geographically, ethnically, socially, or
legally. Even law-abiding masters of merchant ships frequently augmented
their incomes by a little piracy on the side. As David Beers Quinn
remarked, “Coasters were continually being robbed when they were not
taking their turn to rob.... Every ship’s weapons [were] being turned
against all others—Scots, French, English, Hansards, Flemings, each
attacking and being attacked indiscriminately.” The large number of pirates
can be explained, in part, because as navies contracted after wars ended,
discharged veterans often drifted into piracy. So numerous and brazen were
they that in the last years of the seventeenth century and the early years of
the eighteenth, they set up “republics” on islands scattered around the
world from the Caribbean to Madagascar.
The Fearsome Atlantic 37