The Spaniards and the British, even when they fought one another,
were engaged in a bloody and unending war against pirates. When pirates
were caught by the Spaniards, as an English pirate recounted, they were
enslaved or, as Protestants, turned over to the Inquisition. At the hands of
the Inquisitors, they “were all rackt” and given a last breakfast of wine and a
slice of bread fried in honey; “every man alone in his yellow coat, and a
rope about his neck, and a great greene Waxe candle in his hand unlighted”
was marched to a scaffold, some to be burned as “English heretickes,
Lutherans” while others were whipped and sent to the galleys as slaves.
At the same time, the newly organized British navy deployed about
13,000 men mainly to catch pirates. When they succeeded, they either
killed the pirates immediately or brought them back to London where
wholesale executions became a popular spectacle. About 600 Anglo-
American pirates were hanged between 1716 and 1726. These hangings
entertained Londoners but did not stop piracy.
Most pirates got away. When the navy appeared in force, the pirates
scattered to prearranged hideouts where shallow waters or reefs prevented
the larger warships from following. Some even attacked naval warships, as
Captain Kidd did at the mouth of the Chesapeake in 1699. No matter how
savage the punishments, piracy remained a terrifying danger throughout
the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—and not just for ordi-
nary passengers; even an English royal governor of the Carolinas was kid-
napped.
The danger of piracy and the commonplace reality of hunger, thirst,
and storm were bad enough for normal passengers, but far worse for con-
victs or prisoners of war. Often chained, thousands of prisoners of war were
packed off as virtual slaves to Virginia and the West Indies after Oliver
Cromwell crushed the Irish revolt of 1651. The treatment of prisoners of
war after the battle of Sedgemoor, where James II defeated the Monmouth
rebels in 1685, became the paradigm for suppression of the Scottish and
Irish revolts in the eighteenth century. When James II set up what came to
be known as the Bloody Assizes to stamp out opposition to his reign, his
courtiers urged him not to kill the prisoners but to sell them as slaves. He
did, and nearly 1,000 were parceled out to be jammed into available boats
and set off across the Atlantic to be sold into servile exile.
38 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA