The Piratical Republic

And the Colonists' Lifeline

It will come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that the idea of pirates is buried deep within the collective psyche of America. Their mythos runs deep, from Robinson Crusoe (based on the real story of Philip Ashton of Marblehead, Massachusetts) to my personal favorite, Treasure Island. But what you may not know is just how important pirates were to the first century of American history, during the tender period when we were still Anglo Colonies.

America has been from its very beginning a Piratical Republic. I’ll explain.

British mercantile law was fairly convoluted, especially for colonists who were largely just scraping by. Both colonial ventures, Massachusetts Bay and Virginia, distinct though they were, shared one thing in common: they were essentially resourceless. In particular, Virginia, whose prime directive was to make money, contained no gold or anything else that was at all initially valuable. This made for a pretty dreary existence. In addition to this, the mercantilist policy dictated that trade had to go through Great Britain, making the poor souls in North America doubly poor. As Thomas Paine helpfully explains:

To be always running three or four thousand miles with a tale or a petition, waiting four or five months for an answer, which when obtained requires five or six more to explain it in, will in a few years be looked upon as folly and childishness. There was a time when it was proper, and there is a proper time for it to cease.¹ 

There was, however, a catch to Massachusetts Bay and Virginia’s predicament.

Other colonies in the Americas were quite profitable. The colonists who arrived with varying degrees of willingness were already hardly a step removed from piracy. Armed with their knowledge of the seas and their relative freedom from British interference, they set about sacking the colonies of Spain, France, and Portugal, as well as anyone else unfortunate enough to be within their reach. The pirate economy not only gave an outlet for adventure-hungry seamen but was vital to Massachusetts Bay and Virginia’s survival. In her essay “Empire and State,” Elizabeth Mancke informs us:

In the early 17th century, neither the Crown nor its ministers foresaw the extent to which many of the newly chartered ventures, such as those to Virginia or Massachusetts, would deviate institutionally from existing overseas ventures.²

Neither colony would have survived without the activity of the pirates that enabled them to avoid not only the time delay but also the customs duties of legitimate trade from England. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay called the first pirate landing at Plymouth “Divine Providence”; and so it was, with Plymouth having been in dire straits. In fairness to Governor Winthrop, Eric Jay Dolin, author of Black Flags, Blue Waters (2018), tells us:

For many years, in the late 1600s, pirates were not considered misanthropic loners and criminals with anger issues, but rather they were upstanding members of their communities who were welcomed by citizens, merchants, and politicians alike for all the wealth they brought back to the colonies.

In essence, the shadow pirate economy gave both Massachusetts Bay and Virginia exactly the boost they needed to make it through the tender periods that Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke Colony had been unable to survive. In 1684, the governor of Jamaica, awed at the loss of some 80,000 pounds sterling to the City State of Boston, is apocryphally cited as calling the town “the common receptacle of pirates of all nations.”

But this was a creature made by the Crown. Two centuries previously, when the easy wealth of Spain’s new colonies put her firmly in the driver’s seat of European geopolitics, it came to men like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh to cut Spain off at the knees. Their enduring fame is a testament to their success, and this is where the New World fits in. After all, it was John Smith, basically a pirate himself, who was tremendously important to the success of the English colonies in North America. In a letter smuggled out of Jamestown in 1614, Spanish spy Don Diego de Molina implored the Spanish monarch “to stop the progress of a hydra in its infancy.”³ Pirates were understood to be critical to the survival of Anglo Colonial rule in the New World, and thus they were tolerated on both sides of the Atlantic.

The most important aspect, however, was what this pirated silver meant for the English colonies. The sterling that men such as Captain Thomas Cromwell (whose arrival in Plymouth Governor Winthrop praised) brought to Boston enabled Massachusetts Bay to mint their Pine Tree Shilling. This minting’s wild illegality bothered neither Pirates nor Boston, as to both parties it represented the independence for which they were willing to shed blood in order to keep. Again, Dolin says:

In welcoming pirates, the colonists, government officials, and merchants were acting in their own self-interest, the laws and desires of Parliament and the Crown be damned. This latter point is quite important. Even at the time, long before the American Revolution, many Americans were already feeling somewhat separate — and one could argue, independent — from the mother country and did not always feel constrained by its dictates. As the Massachusetts General Court declared in 1678: “the laws of England are bounded within the four seas, and do not reach America, the subjects of His Majesty here being not represented in Parliament. So we have not looked at ourselves to be impeded in our trade by them.”

Piracy had delivered England the edge over Spain in the New World, but in so doing it had also sown the seeds of a new Piratical Republic. Both during and after the American Revolution, the American Navy maintained its piratical tradition, with John Paul Jones raiding the coast of England and then Thomas Jefferson determining that America would end the Barbary states. Pirates were never eliminated from America; rather, they were absorbed into the fabric of our nation.

1. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/pirates-colonial-america

2. Elizabeth Mancke, “Empire and State,” in David Armitage and Michael Braddock (Eds.), Empire and State, The British Atlantic World 1500-1800 (Red Globe Press: 2009), p. 207.

3. Eric Jay Dolin, Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates (Liveright: 2018).