Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online Page B

individual than on the kingdom of belief.
    The English eventually hunted down the remaining guerrillas, and the invasion fleet dispersed to ports back in Europe. Some of the former soldiers settled down to lives as farmers; it was immediately clear that the island’s soil was rich, perhaps as rich as that of the fabulous moneymaker, Barbados. Still, in the early years the ex-soldiers and the other adventurers who were making the real money had turned to a new trade: privateering.
    Privateers were sailors from one nation who had been given permission by their monarchs, contained in documents called letters of marque—also called letters of commission, or simply commissions—to attack and capture enemy ships. Licensed marauders of the seas, they ranged from pirates simply looking for a tissue of legal protection to men who thought of themselves first and foremost as patriot soldiers. A pirate had no commission; he usually attacked anyone and everyone he came upon, regardless of nationality, and he was hanged on sight if captured and given no protection as a prisoner of war. Privateers were supposed to share their “purchase” (treasure) with the nation they represented; the English owed 10 percent to the lord admiral and 6 to the king. Pirates kept what they stole. Privateering was invented by a cash-strapped Henry VIII of England, who had no navy to attack the French (it having been sold by Parliament to pay his debts); he came up with the idea of issuing commissions to three private captains for the purpose of causing havoc with French shipping. Privateers were completely respectable; nobles often signed up when in a financial pinch.
    Piracy was much older and threaded through the history of all seafaring nations. Julius Caesar had been captured by pirates off the island of Pharmacusa and spent thirty-eight days gambling and declaiming his own verses with the corsairs; he joked that when he won his release, he would come back and crucify all of them, which the pirates found hilarious. When he’d bought his release, he quickly borrowed a fleet of ships, tracked down the pirates, and crucified them. St. Patrick was seized by pirates, who sold him as a slave in Ireland. On his return from his battles with the Turks, the ship of Miguel de Cervantes, later the author of
Don Quixote,
was intercepted by Barbary pirates, and he spent five miserable years as an Algerian captive, repeatedly attempting to escape.
    Who were the pirates of the West Indies? They were an assemblage of runaway slaves (the famous maroons), political refugees, disaffected sailors, indentured servants whose masters had tossed them off the plantation, hard-bitten adventure seekers, the flotsam and jetsam of the New World. They will play so vital a part in the coming battles, and they shared enough common characteristics and experiences, that it will clarify things to profile a typical pirate/privateer. There is enough information on the privateers who served under Morgan to give us a detailed composite picture of an average member, drawing from the experiences of various members of the Brethren of the Coast, as the pirates and privateers of the Caribbean were known. We shall call him Roderick.
    Roderick was nineteen years old, short (five foot four being a common height in those days), English (as most of Morgan’s men were), and unmarried—in one survey of Anglo-American pirates from 1716 to 1726, only 4 percent had taken a wife. He was blue-eyed, lean, and quite strong for his size. Roderick had grown up in Dover, one of the great seaports of England, which were veritable factories for sailors and pirates. He went to the docks not only out of tradition (his father and grandfathers had earned their living on the water, rolling into their hovels after six long months away with tales of Morocco and Corsica) but because he had an itch for adventure and newness. He looked with astonishment on friends who became clerks or cobblers. One English sailor wrote