Her efforts fail,
Elizabeth’s efforts were, however, not crowned with success. The land-owners, who had too long been in league with the pirates, rendered every assistance to defeat Sir Peter Carew’s attempts for their suppression. At Berehaven, O’Sullivan Bere afforded them the protection of his castle, covering their vessels with its ordnance, and mustering a fleet of small craft and a sufficient number of men to bid defiance to the Queen’s authority,[125] thus giving fresh courage to the pirates. Fresh outrages were consequently committed on Spanish commerce, and fresh demands made by Philip that pirates who had been taken and convicted should in no case be pardoned, that the Queen’s officers in the western harbours should no longer allow these marauders to take in stores or to frequent her ports, that rewards should be offered for their capture and conviction, and that all persons on shore who aided these lawless expeditions should be severely punished.
but are renewed with increased vigour, though in vain.
In reply to these peremptory demands Elizabeth “resolved to show to the world that she intended to deal honestly in that matter.”[126] More ships of war were sent to sea to prosecute the search with greater vigour, yet, in the October following, a vessel from Flanders to Spain laden with tapestry, clocks, and various household articles, belonging to Philip himself, was intercepted and plundered. So audacious an act seems to have excited real alarm to Elizabeth and her Council. Orders were issued to make strict inquiry along the coast so as to discover the haunts of the pirates, with a view to their immediate trial and conviction; harbour commissioners were appointed to inquire and report upon all vessels entering or leaving places within their jurisdiction; rules were framed for the detection and detention of suspicious vessels, and any landed proprietors or other persons on the coasts who harboured or encouraged them were threatened with severe punishment. But the pirates whom the law had sent forth as privateers had become too strong for the law itself. Somehow or other, those of them who had been captured were soon free, and again at their lawless work; not one was hanged as he ought to have been, and the worst that befel them was a short-lived alarm.
Opening of the African slave trade.
Philip fortunately was not in a warlike humour, and Elizabeth’s excuses that she could do no more than she had done to suppress the piratical acts of her subjects were accepted by the court of Spain. Moreover, a new trade had arisen, affording employment thoroughly congenial to these marauders. The New World, not long discovered in the West, had been suffering so severely from a scarcity of labour, that a supply from other countries was urgently demanded by the colonists. The native Indian, unaccustomed to domestic life or to regular habits of industry, would not, or could not, be taught to familiarise himself with the ways of civilised man; as the forest supplied everything sufficient for his wants, the proud lord of the soil would not subject himself to the dominion of the invaders, while he refused to accept their servitude. Hence it was that as the Europeans advanced, the Indians retired, red men decaying as the white men increased; but the English pirates soon found them substitutes. On the shores of Western Africa, which they had frequented in quest of the Spanish merchant vessels from India, men of a quiet and peaceable nature were to be found basking in the sunshine in harmless idleness, and, too frequently, in a state little better than that of “the beasts that perish.”
Vast in number, and with little or no occupations, they offered a profitable source of commerce to such persons as were disposed to enter upon the traffic of human beings, and who would not hesitate to forcibly transport the superabundant population of Africa to meet the rapidly increasing demands for labour in the Western world.
In those days, when the transition from privateering to piracy was easy of accomplishment, the pirate soon became a practised and desperate slaver. There were then no laws to prevent this inhuman traffic. Indeed the nobler Spaniards, who first peopled the tropical portion of the vast American continent and the West India Islands, were of opinion that, in the innocent and docile children of Africa might be found, if kindly treated, servants who would labour without repugnance, and who, while replacing the native Indians, would materially improve their own then wretched condition. The Spanish settlers therefore encouraged the exchange, and, as emigrants from other nations flocked in great numbers to the newly discovered West, the demand for African labour soon became enormous.
Character of its promoters.
When the freebooters of England found it either necessary or expedient to seek elsewhere other opportunities for their lawless and plundering propensities, no employment could have been more agreeable to their habits than that of a slave trade on the coast of Africa, and thus a commerce, which, if it had been conducted from the first by honest men, on a well-defined system of immigration, might have proved of immense benefit to every one connected with it, became, in the hands of worthless adventurers, one of the most depraved and demoralising recorded in history. Good, possibly, in its original intentions, this trade, from its earliest dawn, was made infamous by the desperate class of men engaged in it from its commencement, and it maintained its character for infamy, unredeemed by any civilising influences, even to our own time.