Plunder of Peruvian towns.
As we read the journals of those remote voyages it is easy to forget for a moment that the business is piracy. We seem to see the staunch ships, superbly handled by their expert sailors, blithely cleaving the blue waters under the Southern Cross; we breathe the cool salt breeze; we watch with interest the gray cliffs, the strange foliage, the birds and snakes and insects which arouse the curiosity of the mariners; we follow them to the Galapagos Islands, which first suggested to Darwin and afterward to Wallace the theory of natural selection; we note with pleasure their description of the uncouth natives of Australia; and we remember Thackeray when we encounter oysters so huge that Basil Ringrose has to cut them in quarters.[310] In the careless freedom of life on an unknown sea with each morrow bringing its new adventures, we forget what company we are in, till suddenly the victim ship heaves in sight, the brief chase ends in a deadly struggle, the Spanish colours go down before the black flag, a few bodies are buried in the depths, and a rich spoil is divided. It is vulgar robbery and murder after all, and there was a good deal of it in the South Sea. The coast of Peru, where there were the richest towns, suffered the most. The Lima Almanacs for 1685-87, comprising an official record of events for each year immediately preceding, mention the towns of Guayaquil, Santiago de Miraflores, and five others as plundered by the pirates. When Davis divided his booty at Juan Fernandez, there was enough to give every man a sum equivalent to $20,000. Very often a pirate got more gold and silver than he could handle or carry, but it was apt to slip away easily. Many of Davis’s company quickly lost every dollar in gambling with their comrades. Our friend Raveneau de Lussan, who took to piracy in order to satisfy his creditors, tells his readers that his winnings at play, added to his share of booty, amounted to 30,000 pieces of eight, which would now be equivalent to at least $120,000; so we may hope that he paid his debts like an honest man.
Effects of the alliance between France and Spain.
The event which did more than anything else to put an end to buccaneering was the accession of a Bourbon prince, Philip V., to the throne of Spain in 1701. It was then that his grandfather, Louis XIV., declared there were no longer any Pyrenees. Ever since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain and France had been enemies. Their relations now became so friendly that all the ports of Spanish America, whether in the West Indies or on the Pacific coast, were thrown open to French merchants. This made trade more profitable than piracy, and united the French and Spanish navies in protecting it. The English and Dutch fleets also put forth redoubled efforts, and during the next score of years the decline of the pirates was rapid.
Carolina and the Bahamas.
The first English settlements south of Virginia were made at the time when buccaneering was mighty and defiant. The colony of Sir John Yeamans, on Cape Fear River, was begun in 1665, and it was in 1670, the very year of the treaty of America, that Governor Sayle landed at Port Royal. The earliest settlers in Carolina, as we have seen, were not of such good quality as those who came a few years later. They furnished a convenient market for the pirates, who were apt to be open-handed customers, ready to pay good prices in Spanish gold, whether for clothes, weapons, and brandy brought from Europe, or for timber, tar, tobacco, rice, or corn raised in America. One of the Bahama Islands, called New Providence, had been settled by the English. Its remarkable facilities for anchorage and its convenient situation made it a favourite haunt of pirates, whose evil communications corrupted the good manners of the inhabitants. Rather than lose such customers they befriended them in every possible way, so that the island became notorious as one of the worst nests of desperadoes in the American waters. The malady was not long in spreading to the mainland. The Carolina coast, with its numerous sheltered harbours and inlets, afforded excellent lurking-places, whither one might retreat from pursuers, and where one might leisurely repair damages and make ready for further mischief. The pirates, therefore, long haunted that coast, and it was rather a help than a hindrance to them when settlements began to be made there. For now instead of a wilderness it became a market where they could buy food, medicines, tools, or most of such things as they needed. So long as they behaved moderately well while ashore, it was not necessary for the Carolinians to press them with questions as to what they did on the high seas. For at least thirty years after the founding of Carolina, nearly all the currency in the colony consisted of Spanish gold and silver brought in by freebooters from the West Indies.
Effect of the Navigation Laws.
Nothing went so far toward making the colonists tolerate piracy as the Navigation Laws which we have already described. We have seen how they enabled English merchants to charge exorbitant prices for goods shipped to America, and to pay as little as possible for American exports. The contrast between such customers and the pirates was entirely in favour of the latter, who could afford to be liberal both with goods and with cash that had cost them nothing but a little fighting.[311] After the founding of Charleston, the dealings with pirates there were made the subject of complaint in London. In 1684 Robert Quarry, acting governor of Carolina, a man of marked ability and good reputation, was removed from office for complicity with pirates. This did not, however, prevent his being appointed to other responsible positions. His successor, Joseph Morton, actually gave permission to two buccaneer captains to bring their Spanish prizes into the harbour. Soon afterward John Boon, a member of the council, was expelled for holding correspondence with freebooters. At the close of Ludwell’s administration, it was said that Charleston fairly swarmed with pirates, against whose ill-got gold the law was powerless. Along with such commercial reasons, the terror of their fame conspired to protect them. Desperadoes who had sacked Maracaibo and Panama might do likewise to Charleston or New York. It was not only in Carolina that such fears combined with the Navigation Laws to sustain piracy. In Pennsylvania a son of the deputy-governor Markham was elected to the Assembly, but not allowed to take a seat because of dealings with the freebooters. Governor Fletcher, of New York, was deeply implicated in such proceedings, and the record of distant New England was far from stainless.
Effect of rice culture.
But at the end of the seventeenth century a marked change became visible. In South Carolina the cultivation of rice had reached such dimensions that tonnage enough could not be found to carry the crop of 1699 across the Atlantic. The colonists were allowed to sell in foreign markets such goods as were not wanted in England, and England took very little rice. Most of it went to Holland, Hamburg, Bremen, Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal. As rice was thus becoming the chief source of income for South Carolina, people began to be sorely vexed when pirates captured their cargoes. Besides this, the character of the population was entirely changed by the influx of steady, law-abiding English dissenters under Blake, and by the immigration of large numbers of Huguenots. The pirates became unpopular, and the year 1699 witnessed the hanging of seven of them at Charleston. As the colony yearly grew stronger and the administration firmer, such rigours increased, and the great gallows on Execution Dock was decorated with corpses swinging in chains, a dozen or more at a time, until the pirates came to think of that harbour as a place to be shunned.