There was no coordinated war on piracy in the early eighteenth century. While piracy was consistently seen as a significant enough problem – sometimes real and sometimes imagined – to prompt regular government responses and even crown intervention, there was no organised imperial campaign against pirates operating in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. There simply was not the capacity for such a campaign, especially as piracy was a periodic rather than continuous threat across the regions that pirates targeted. While the popula-tion of pirates operating in the early eighteenth century was substantial (at least between 1716 and 1722), they were not a substantial enough population to be able to impact all regions at all times. Instead, pirates voyaged from place to place, sometimes in search of richer or more vulnerable prizes and sometimes chased by naval warships or colonial guardships. This meant that piracy was an episodic problem in different waters at different times, prompting intermittent responses within these regions by colonial bodies, mercantile groups, naval officers and London-based government agencies. Just as pirates reacted to the contexts that they faced in the distinctive regions that they targeted, those impacted by and seeking to suppress pirates reacted to their arrival using the varied marine resources and legal instruments at their disposal.

Following the sequential movements and impacts of pirates between 1716 and 1726 exposes the ways in which piracy became entangled with cognate issues surrounding commercial politics, maritime endeavour, naval power and sovereignty on the seas in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. For each theatre that pirates impacted, it was merchants and companies involved in profitable long-distance trades that prompted the British government and Admiralty to act. Piratical attacks highlighted the vulnerable nature of these regions during peacetime and, in response, British merchant groups mobilised to lobby for naval protection over the maritime spaces where their trade was conducted. This then played a central role in influencing and guiding state responses to commercial threats in extra-European waters and directly contributed to the sporadic projection of British imperial power over sea spaces. This contradicts the idea that the decline of piracy was effected by Royal Navy warships that were dispatched to hunt and exterminate pirates.

After his vessel was seized by pirates at Ouidah in June 1719, Richard Blincko reported that the three pirate captains – Oliver La Buse, Thomas Cocklyn and Richard Taylor – had declared their intent to proceed to Brazil before settling at Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. After receiving Blincko's account in November 1719, the British East India Company began lobbying for naval support against Atlantic pirates. This resulted in the dispatch of four Royal Navy vessels to the Indian Ocean under the command of a commodore whose primary instruction was to suppress piracy. Operating in the Indian Ocean for three years from 1721 to 1724, this squadron constituted the most substantial naval force to be assigned with the specific directive to suppress pirates after the surge in Atlantic piracy in 1716. Yet, this squadron was assigned to the Indian Ocean before any reports were received that Atlantic pirates had committed depredations there and even before any verification that Atlantic pirates had voyaged around the Cape of Good Hope.

At least four pirate crews made their way from the West African coast to the Indian Ocean in 1720. These were Christopher Condent's crew as well as members of Oliver La Buse, Thomas Cocklyn and Edward England's crews who coordinated under the changing leadership of La Buse, Jasper Seager and Richard Taylor. Between 1720 and 1722, these crews committed a handful of depredations. The most significant of these were the captures of the Faza Ramance – a rich Arab trader travelling from Jeddah – by Condent and the Nossa Senhora do Cabo – a large Portuguese vessel carrying the Viceroy of Goa and a large quantity of treasure back to Portugal – by Richard Taylor and La Buse. The British East India Company suffered only one significant depredation by these crews when England and Taylor captured the Cassandra – a Company vessel – off the island of Anjouan in August 1720. The Company reported that this loss cost them approximately £40,000. The loss occurred nine months after the Company first began lobbying George I to send naval ships against pirates in the Indian Ocean.

A note on the following tables: These have been compiled using the Admiralty List Books covering the years 1714 to 1726. The numbers listed are based on the average number of vessels and men assigned to naval service and particular regions each year. It is important to note that while vessels were assigned to different squadrons and regions, these were not necessarily present in that region for the entire time that they were assigned there. Some had yet to depart and some had left their stations to return to England. When relevant, I have provided information of the specific locations of naval vessels within each chapter.

Vessel Types and Rates

This book contains pirates. But it is not a book primarily about pirates. Instead, this book focuses on the groups and individuals engaged in British colonial and commercial enterprise in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans who sought to suppress piracy. Following the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and especially between 1716 and 1726, a significant maritime population were stimulated by changing circumstances to turn to piracy and voyage to different regions in pursuit of plunder and opportunity. In the process, pirates encountered, obstructed and antagonised diverse participants of empire, who responded using the available resources – whether naval, administrative, or legislative – to protect specific trades and waterways from piracy. In shifting the perspective from pirates to anti-piracy campaigns, Suppressing Piracy argues that there was no coordinated war on piracy in the early eighteenth century. Instead, a series of fragmented and distinctive campaigns, shaped and influenced by events occurring in Europe and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, slowly reduced and isolated Atlantic pirates. Far from the concerted and premeditated enterprise embraced by existing accounts of British anti-piracy campaigns, this was in fact a sequential process that occurred only as state, merchant and colonial actors reacted to the impact and threat of piracy in different regions of the Greater Caribbean, North America, West Africa and the Indian Ocean. British imperial authority was shaped within and across these spaces through the multilateral web of connections that linked these groups.

As the Introduction outlines, eighteenth-century pirates operated under distinctly different circumstances than their seventeenth-century counterparts. This occurred as the lines between the licit act of privateering and the illicit act of piracy became more sharply delineated in British colonial law at the turn of the century, at the same time that a more coherent and beneficial British imperial framework was emerging. This resulted in declining opportunities for pirates as the legal framework became more rigid (at least, in theory) and alternative markets became less important to developing colonial economies. As a result, early eighteenth-century Atlantic pirates found themselves more ostracised from British colonial ports and, as we shall see, faced a more hostile environment in the various regions in which they sailed.

On 26 July 1718, Woodes Rogers arrived in New Providence with four merchant vessels, three naval ships, soldiers for a garrison and all the materials necessary for securing the settlement at Nassau. His arrival was met with very little opposition. Only Charles Vane, one of the chief pirate captains in Nassau, protested his arrival by setting fire to a captured French ship, firing his guns and fleeing the island with around ninety men. After this, Rogers was able to peaceably land and take possession of the fort. The inhabitants, detailed as 300 men, willingly surrendered to their new governor and were granted pardon. After thirteen years without any form of governance and frequent lobbying by settlers, merchants and the Board of Trade, the Bahamas was converted from a proprietary to a crown colony and Rogers appointed as the first royal governor. Yet, this only occurred at the behest of private investors, including Rogers, who outfitted the expedition and aimed to profit through the consolidation and development of the Bahamas. As a representative of both state authority and private enterprise, Rogers was forced to contend with the issues arising from the resulting semi-private endeavour in which the Bahamas became a royal colony but remained under the control of private interests. Although this arrangement proved beneficial at first, it soon obstructed Rogers’ activities in Nassau as neither the crown nor investors proved willing to finance the security of the colony. As a result, the project shifted from a transatlantic endeavour to a local struggle against external threats.

Rogers has long been recognised as a central figure in the suppression of Atlantic piracy in the early eighteenth century, but his endeavours have been persistently misrepresented as the result of a proactive state-led operation to remove the pirate base in New Providence. As the previous chapter discussed, the British government's response to the surge in piracy in the Greater Caribbean had been restricted to a slightly increased naval presence in key regions alongside a relatively ineffective pardon. No measures had been taken to remove the pirate presence in the Bahamas. Instead, this project required the intercession of private enterprise which promised to secure the Bahamas from pirate occupation without requiring substantial public expenditure in return for rights over land-based taxes.

The Caribbean Sea is sometimes described as an American Mediterranean, but this is to ignore the fact that the Caribbean is actually a reverse image of the Mediterranean Sea, at least in geographical terms. On the other hand, both seas, until the Suez and Panama canals were constructed, could only be entered from the Atlantic, though whereas the Mediterranean has only one entrance, at the Strait of Gibraltar, the Caribbean has multiple entrances between a whole string of islands. It therefore hardly helps to describe the Caribbean in Mediterranean terms, though they were both, in a curious element of similarity, the recipients of waters from a giant river, the Mississippi (plus the Rio Grande and the Orinoco) and the Nile, plus the Black Sea rivers.

The two great continents of North and South America are linked by the narrow Isthmus of Panama, which encloses the Caribbean at its western end. At the eastern end of the sea there is a string of relatively small islands, the Lesser Antilles and the Bahama Islands, between which there are numerous passages, though not all were favoured by sailors. The distance between the two extremes is perhaps 3000 kilometres. The sea itself is divided into two parts by the long narrow island of Cuba and the other large islands of the Greater Antilles. The north part is the Gulf of Mexico, and the south is the Caribbean Sea proper.

This geographical layout is the clue to understanding many of the peculi¬arities and particularities of Caribbean maritime history. The openings on the east, through the many islands, scattered between Guiana and Florida, allow a strong current to flow from east to west out of the Atlantic and into the Caribbean; the solid barrier of the Isthmus and Central America forces the current to turn north and flow out of the Caribbean between Cuba and Yucatán; the closed nature of the Gulf of Mexico diverts the current once more past the north coast of Cuba, flowing this time west to east, and it exits the sea between Hispaniola and Florida and swings north to flow between the Bahama Islands and Florida; at this point it becomes the Gulf Stream, to which most Western Europeans are extremely grateful for their equable climate.