CHAPTER XVI.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF PIRATES.
Pompey and the pirates.
Piracy on the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.
At no other time in the world’s history has the business of piracy thriven so greatly as in the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth. Its golden age may be said to have extended from about 1650 to about 1720. In ancient times the seafaring was too limited in its area to admit of such wholesale operations as went on after the broad Atlantic had become a highway between the Old World and the New. No doubt those Cretan and Cilician pirates who were suppressed by the great Pompey were terrible fellows. After the destruction of Carthage they controlled the Mediterranean from the coast of Judæa to the Pillars of Hercules, and captured the cargoes of Egyptian grain till at times Rome seemed threatened with famine. Roman commanders one after another went down before them, until at length, in the year B. C. 67, Pompey was appointed dictator over the Mediterranean and all its coasts for fifty miles inland. The dimensions of his task are indicated by the fact that in the course of that year he captured 3,000 vessels, hung or crucified 10,000 pirates, and made prisoners of 20,000 more, whom he hustled off to hard labour in places far from the sound of surf. Nevertheless those ancient pirates worked on a much smaller scale than the buccaneers of America. In the Indian Ocean adjacent stretches of the Pacific there has always been much piracy until the recent days when French and English ships have patrolled those waters. The fame of the Chinese and Malays as sea robbers is well established. So too with those vile communities north of Sahara which we used to call the Barbary States, their eminence in crime is unsurpassed. From the fifteenth century to the first years of the nineteenth, piracy was one of their chief sources of revenue; their ships were a terror to the coasts of Europe, and for devilish atrocity scarcely any human annals are so black as those of Morocco and Algiers. But as these Mussulman pirates and those of eastern Asia were as busily at work in the seventeenth century as at any other time, their case does not impair my statement that the age of the buccaneers was the Golden Age of piracy. The deeds done in American waters greatly swelled, if they did not more than double, the volume of maritime robbery already existing.
The Vikings were not pirates in the strict sense.
Blackstone on the crime of piracy.
If we look into mediæval history for examples to compare with those already cited, we may observe that the Scandinavian Vikings, such men as sailed with Rolf and Guthorm and Swegen Forkbeard, are sometimes spoken of as pirates. If such a classification of them were correct, we should be obliged to assign the Golden Age of piracy to the ninth and tenth centuries, for surely all other slayings and plunderings done by seafaring men shrink into insignificance beside the operations of those mighty warriors of the North. But it is neither a just nor a correct use of language that would count as pirates a race of men who simply made war like all their contemporaries, only more effectively. The warfare of the Vikings was that of barbarous heathen, but it was not criminal unless it is a crime to be born a barbarian. The moral difference between killing the enemy in battle and murdering your neighbour is plain enough. If there is any word which implies thorough and downright criminality, it is pirate. In the old English law the pirate was declared an enemy to the human race, with whom no faith need be kept. “As therefore,” says Blackstone, “he has renounced all the benefits of society and government, and has reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him, and every community hath a right by the rule of self-defence to inflict that punishment upon him which every individual would in a state of nature have been otherwise entitled to do for any invasion of his person or property.”[303] Pirates taken at sea were commonly hung from the yard-arm without the formality of a trial, and on land neither church nor shrine could serve them as sanctuary. It was also well understood that they were not included in the benefit of a general declaration of pardon or amnesty.
Character of piracy.
The pirate thus elaborately outlawed was anybody who participated in violent robbery on the high seas, or in criminal plunder along their coasts. The details of such crimes were apt to be full of cruelty. The capture of a merchant ship with more or less bloodshed was usually involved, and such bloodshed was wholesale murder. If provisions were less than ample, the survivors were thrown overboard, or set ashore on some lonely island and left to starve, and this often happened. Murders from sheer wantonness were not uncommon, and the sack of a coast town or village was attended with nameless horrors. On the whole we cannot wonder that public opinion should have branded the skippers and crews who did such things as the very worst of criminals. One can see that in old trials for piracy, as in trials for witchcraft, the dread and detestation were often so great as to outweigh the ordinary English presumption that an accused person must have the benefit of the doubt until proved guilty. Desire to extirpate the crime became a stronger feeling than reluctance to punish the innocent. The slightest suspicion of complicity with pirates brought with it extreme peril.