Caribbean History Paper on Piracy

Introduction

Kris Lane weaves a tale of pirate activities in the Americas and of Spanish responses to those activities that reveals aspects of pirate life and culture not usually addressed in the standard histories of Latin America. He demythologizes the pirates of popular culture and places them in their broader historical context in which their activities are seen as more pecuniary than nationalistic. Lane presents a concise narrative of the seaborne attackers of Spain's colonial empire, and, to a much lesser extent, Portugal's. The book's claim to originality and to revisionism is that it presents a concise overview of piracy in American waters during the early modern period--including considerable discussion of the often overlooked piracy in the Pacific.

Discussion

Except for some archival research in South American archives, this work is based on, and, as Lane admits, dependent on, the work of scholars such as David Cordingly, David Marely, Peter Bradely, Peter Gerhard, Charles Boxer, and Carla Rahn Phillips--to name a few. In producing this work, Lane has been more interested in producing a companion text on piracy suitable for World History or similar courses than in providing an original text based on primary research (p. xvii). Despite the existence of regional and chronological studies of pirates, until now, no one has attempted an aggregate treatment of pirates in the Americas. This is what Lane has undertaken.

In doing so, he had to deal with the often nebulous distinction between corsairs, pirates, privateers, buccaneers, and freebooters. These distinctions are largely a matter of perspective, but they are, nonetheless, important because they represented different kinds of activities. Piracy refers to unsanctioned sea-raiding, while privateering refers to raids authorized by a monarch or other governing body. Corsario was the Spanish term for pirates and privateers alike. The terms buccaneer and freebooter (filibustier in French) arose during the seventeenth century to refer to the motley mix of Dutch, French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese sailors who formed groups of raiders independent of nationalist ties often operating without even symbolic legal sanction. The actual distinctions were usually unclear and, for the recipients of these violent attacks, the distinction made little difference. To the Spanish inhabitants of the Americas, they were all foreign criminals who deserved no quarter.

Lane divides the history of piracy in the Americas into five periods--the French corsairs between 1500 and 1559, the Elizabethan pirates (1558-1603), Dutch pirates and privateers (1570-1648), the seventeenth-century buccaneers, and the end of buccaneering with the last of the freebooters around 1730. He begins with a discussion of anti-Spanish piracy along the Barbary Coast in the sixteenth century as a context for the activities of the French corsairs in the Americas. These corsairs were led by petty nobles and Huguenots of the sixteenth century. The patterns that arose out of Berber and French piracy in the Mediterranean and later French piracy in the Americas set the stage for the patterns that marked the piracy of the early modern period. This piracy reflected the broader religious and political tensions within ...