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By Root 1155 0

Europe from the Americas. But the British were the most ruthless, and Sir Francis Drake’s prayer ‘I know many means to do her Majesty good service and to make us rich, for we must have gold before we see England,’ can stand as a mission-statement for all of them. When Drake finally reached home – after plundering a mule train on the Panamanian isthmus loaded with gold and silver in 1573 – not only was he rich but he soon became an English national hero. There was something about the man’s freebooting spirit that chimed with the mood of a sixteenth-century England, a nation beginning to feel that being an island gave both security and opportunity: when you have no troublesome land borders (the Welsh had been ‘pacified’ and the Scots were increasingly more envious than dangerous), all foreigners are exotic and it is easy to feel indifferent about what your citizens do to them. For anyone willing to face the risks involved, piracy was free enterprise, red in tooth and claw, open to anyone and offering the prospect of great wealth.

Its practitioners were a hugely varied bunch. In true pirate fashion, the origins of Edward Teach – ‘Blackbeard’ – are obscure. His end is not: in 1718 his severed head hung from the bowsprit of a ship sent from Carolina to tackle the menace of piracy. Another pirate, Stede Bonnet, was said to have been a gentleman plantation owner who took up robbery to escape his nagging wife. (Not that it was an entirely male world: two women pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, were captured and escaped the gallows only when they revealed that they were pregnant, Anne Bonny ending her days as a respectable matriarch of eighty-four.) Howel Davis had been first mate on a slaving ship. Henry Mainwaring was the son of an MP and graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford: he was neither the first nor the last man to take up the trade after being employed by the Crown to suppress piracy, and he helped other ‘respectable’ citizens to embark on piratical careers by stage-managing bogus kidnappings, so that they could, if they chose, later return to normal life. William Kidd, hanged at execution dock in Wapping in 1701, was another who had decided that joining the pirates was a more lucrative career than the commission he had been given to hunt them down.

As the fates of some of these characters indicate, the British government was in two (or more) minds about those of its citizens who found the pickings of the Spanish Main – the Caribbean Sea alongside the mainland of Spanish America – irresistible. Medieval convention allowed those who had been robbed in foreign territory and been unable to get satisfaction in court to apply for permission to recoup any losses by force of arms. From this, it was only a small step to the invention of privateering, a system by which the Admiralty Court in London granted permission to private ships to attack the vessels of Britain’s enemies. In exchange for a licence to steal, the government demanded a share of the proceeds. The pith-helmeted, district-officered empire which was wound up in the twentieth century had its origins in the chaotic free enterprise of places like Port Royal. For while Jamaica may have been on the fringes of the known world, it was integral to the London Treasury and a central part of the strategy for war against Spain. This pattern of using freelances or proxies was one the British would employ time and again as they built their empire. Sometimes territories were conquered at the order of governments, but much of the time the flag was planted by licensed companies or some freebooting capitalist given a nod or a wink in London.

One of the most spectacular of these adventurers was Henry Morgan, a Welshman thought to have arrived in Jamaica in the 1650s. Morgan obtained a licence to fight the Spanish at sea, but – like many similar figures in the centuries to come – recognized that a faraway government would be almost powerless to stop him doing as he pleased, and would be likely, moreover, to thank him for it afterwards. In July 1668 he led a group of pirates in an