To call the Elizabethan sea kings “pirates” is silly and outrageous.
When we thus recall what the crime of piracy really was, we cannot fail to see how reprehensible is the language sometimes applied, by writers who should know better, to the noble sailors who in the days of Queen Elizabeth saved England from the Spanish Inquisition.[304] Had it not been for the group of devoted men among whom Sir Francis Drake was foremost, there was imminent danger three hundred years ago that human freedom might perish from off the face of the earth. The name of Drake is one that should never be uttered without reverence, especially by Americans, since it is clear that but for him our history would not have begun in the days of Elizabeth’s successor. His character was far loftier than that of Nelson, the only other sea warrior whose achievements have equalled his. His performances never transgressed the bounds of legitimate warfare as it was conducted in the sixteenth century. Among his contemporaries he was exceptionally humane, for he would not permit the wanton destruction of life or property. To use language which even remotely alludes to such a man as a pirate is to show sad confusion of ideas. As for Elizabeth’s other great captains,—such as Raleigh, Cavendish, Hawkins, Gilbert, Grenville, Frobisher, Winter, and the Howards,—few of them rose to the moral stature of Drake, but they were very far above the level of freebooters. It seems ridiculous that it should be necessary to say so. Their business was warfare, not robbery.
Features of maritime warfare out of which piracy could grow.
Privateering.
It is nevertheless undeniable that naval warfare in the days of Elizabeth stood on a lower moral plane than naval warfare in the days of Victoria, and things were done without hesitation then that would not be tolerated now. Wars are ugly things at best, but civilized people have learned how to worry through them without inflicting quite so much misery as formerly. Three centuries ago not only were the usages more harsh than now, but the methods of conducting maritime warfare contained a feature out of which, under favouring circumstances, piracy afterward grew. There can be no doubt that the seventeenth century was the golden age of pirates because it came immediately after the age of Elizabeth. The circumstances of the struggle of the Netherlands and England against the greatest military power in the world made it necessary for the former to rely largely, and the latter almost exclusively, upon naval operations. Dutch ships on the Indian Ocean and English ships off the American coasts effectually cut the Spaniard’s sinews of war. Now in that age ocean navigation was still in its infancy, and the work of creating great and permanent navies was only beginning. Government was glad to have individuals join in the work of building and equipping ships of war, and it was accordingly natural that individuals should expect to reimburse themselves for the heavy risk and expense by taking a share in the spoils of victory. In this way privateering came into existence, and it played a much more extensive part in maritime warfare than it now does. The navy was but incompletely nationalized. Into expeditions that were strictly military in purpose there entered some of the elements of a commercial speculation, and as we read them with our modern ideas we detect the smack of buccaneering.
Fighting without declaring war.
To this it should be added that fighting between hostile states occurred much more frequently than now without a formal declaration of war. There were times in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the hatred between the commercial rivals, Venice and Genoa, was so fierce that whenever their ships happened to meet on the Mediterranean they went to fighting at sight, yet those bloody scrimmages did not always lead to war. In the youth of Christopher Columbus it was seldom that Christian and Turkish ships met without bloodshed, on the assumption that war was the normal state of things between Crescent and Cross. So when the Dutch were contending against Philip II. the English often helped their heroic cousins by capturing Spanish ships long before war was declared between Philip and Elizabeth. Such laxity of international usage made it easy to cross the line which demarcates privateering from piracy.
Lack of protection for neutral ships.
It should also be remembered that the ships of neutral nations had no such protection as now. The utmost that is now permitted the belligerent ship is to search the neutral ship for weapons or other materials of war bound for an enemy’s port, and to confiscate such materials without further injury to person or property. In the sixteenth century it was allowable to confiscate the neutral ship bound for an enemy’s port, sell her cargo for prize money, and hold her crew and passengers for ransom. The milder doctrine that any kind of goods might be seized, but not the ship and her people, had been propounded but was not yet generally accepted.
Spanish treasure.