Godly Pirates

Clarence Henry Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century (1910) lacks the reticence of today's historical scholarship. Haring's criticism of Spanish mercantilism and Spanish national character fills the text with the sort of judgement that historians eschew today. The book was an Oxford University thesis for the Bachelor of Letters degree in 1909. Haring earned his B.A. at Harvard in 1907 and then attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. The book marked the beginning of a long and distinguished career in the study of Latin America.

His discussion of the religious motivation of English privateers is typical.

The Spaniards, ever since the days of the Dominican monk and bishop, Las Casas, had been reprobated as the heartless oppressors and murderers of the native Indians. The original owners of the soil had been dispossessed and reduced to slavery. In the West Indies, the great islands, Cuba and Hispaniola, were rendered desolate for want of inhabitants. Two great empires, Mexico and Peru, had been subdued by treachery, their kings murdered, and their people made to suffer a living death in the mines of Potosi and New Spain. Such was the Protestant Englishman's conception, in the sixteenth century, of the results of Spanish colonial policy. To avenge the blood of these innocent victims, and teach the true religion to the survivors, was to glorify the Church militant and strike a blow at Antichrist. Spain, moreover, in the eyes of the Puritans, was the lieutenant of Rome, the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, who harried and burnt their Protestant brethren whenever she could lay hands upon them. That she was eager to repeat her ill-starred attempt of 1588 and introduce into the British Isles the accursed Inquisition was patent to everyone. Protestant England, therefore, filled with the enthusiasm and intolerance of a new faith, made no bones of despoiling the Spaniards, especially as the service of God was likely to be repaid with plunder.
Haring, Buccaneers, 33.

The religious conflicts of the Reformation entwine with national rivalries. Privateers were outfitted by their governments and sent out to make war upon sworn enemies. But, if they attacked and plundered ships of the wrong nation, the penalties could be severe.

The briganteen, Charles, was outfitted in Boston in 1703, "to War, Fight, Take, Kill, Suppress and Destroy, any Pirates, Privateers, or other Subjects and Vassals of France, or Spain, the Declared Enemies of the Crown of England" (The arraignment, tryal, and condemnation, of Capt. John Quelch ... [London, 1705], 20).

These orders were issued to Captain Daniel Plowman, but there was a mutiny on board the ship shortly after leaving port. The Charles was not specifically named as a privateer ship in its commission and orders, although it was to "take, seize, sink, or destroy any of the Ships, Vessels or Goods belonging to France or Spain" (Quelch, 21). After the mutiny, however, and the actions under the leadership of Captain John Quelch, it became a pirate ship.

Plowman's instructions included moral and religious leadership. Swearing, drunkenness, and profanity were to be punished.

First, You are to keep such good Orders among your said Briganteen's Company, that Swearing, Drunkenness and Prophaneness be avoided, or duly Punished; and that GOD be duly Worshipped.
Quelch, 20.

In the trial of John Quelch, the Charles is termed a "Private Man of War" (Quelch, 2), hence a privateer vessel. Quelch neglected Plowman's orders after the commissioned captain had died aboard ship, orders that required the ship to return to Boston. Moreover, he led the crew, some against their will, to attack and plunder Portuguese ships--a crime against an ally of the queen.

You neglected his Orders, and those of your Owners, to return with the said Private Man of War to Boston, would not set on Shore Matthew Pymer and John Clifford, Two of your Company (who dreading your Pyratical Intention) ernestly desired the same; but bore up the Helm to Sea, directing your Course for Ferdinando Island, and the Coast of Brasil, whereby it is open, manifest, you intended Murders; Piracy, and Robberies; which afterwards you perpetrated.
Quelch, 2.

In the charges against John Quelch detailing each of nine ships plundered over the course of two months, certain phrases are repeated.

[B]y Force and Arms upon the High Sea, (within the Jurisdiction of the Admiralty of England,) Piratically and Feloniously did Surprize, Seize, and Take a small Fishing Vessel, (having Portuguise Men on Board) and belonging to the Subjects of the King of Portugal, (Her Majesty's good Allie) and out of her then and there, within the Jurisdiction aforesaid, Feloniosly and Piratically, did by Force and Arms take and carry away ...
Quelch, 2.

The second charge replaces "a small Fishing Vessel" with "a small Brigantine of the Berthen of about fifteen Tons" (Quelch, 3), and so on.

Under the leadership of Captain Plowman, had he lived, the Charles could have plundered French and Spanish vessels for the glory of England and to God. Doing so would have brought profits to the merchants who owned and financed the ship. The crew would have been godly pirates, thus not pirates in the language of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Under the leadership of Captain Quelch, however, they plundered the ships of an ally, and hence were criminal pirates. For these crimes they were executed.

Triumph of the English

Following Columbus, many Europeans explored and began colonizing the Americas. Three nations grew more significant than all the others in the struggle for North America: Spain, France, and England. Jamestown, Québec, and Santa Fe were each established within months of the others several decades after the Spanish founded St. Augustine, Florida. By some means of reckoning, the English were the last to arrive, the most tardy to initiate serious efforts to colonize, and they came from the smallest country. Yet, they triumphed!

Why did the English prevail?

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen offer a hypothesis in A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004).

… the appearance of new business practices, a culture of technological inquisitiveness, and a climate receptive to political and economic risk taking.
Schweikart and Allen, 15.

My first observation regarding this hypothesis notes the absence of the Indians that fed the colonists—Spanish, French, English, Dutch, …. Were the American indigenes irrelevant to the struggle, or unable to affect the eventual success of the English? Perhaps their absence has merit, for the English had the least auspicious record of converting the Natives to their way of life (see James Axtell, The Invasion Within [1986]—a book ignored by Schweikart and Allen, although they cite inaccurately the article length version of this book as I’ve noted previously). Be that as it may, let us, as the phenomenologists say, bracket that question while I proceed to identify the key points Schweikart and Allen offer in support of their hypothesis.

New Business Practices

The Company of the Staple, founded in 1356, was among the first joint-stock companies that led England’s development of international trade. Schweikart and Allen also cite the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company, and the East India Company; they could have added the Hudson’s Bay Company, which proved more significant in North America. The principle advantages of the joint-stock companies were that they survived the death of their primary owners and they limited liability because stockholders could lose no more than their investments. These companies facilitated middle-class merchants taking the lead in England’s overseas ventures.

Contrast these business practices associated with the development of capitalism to Spain’s “rigid adherence to mercantilism” (Schweikart and Allen, 11). If they failed to find gold and silver, Spanish ventures were an economic failure. Hernando de Soto, for example, was born into poverty and died a king—an imaginative one in the wilds of America,—but his men failed to bring back a return on the investments that sent them marauding through the future states of Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, and points in between. Their astounding success in efforts “to disturb and devastate the land,” as Rodrigo Rangel put it, did not benefit Spanish colonization. How de Soto’s ecological assault may have facilitated later English colonization takes us back into analysis of questions bracketed, so I defer this part of the narrative for later. Suffice it to note for the moment that the single sentence regarding de Soto in A Patriot’s History fails to offer any clues to his possible significance (10).

The authors of A Patriot’s History note that France abandoned mercantilism later than England, but omit all mention of the joint-stock Company of One Hundred Associates that played a central role in colonization of La Nouvelle-France.

Receptive Climate

Schweikart and Allen bury their exposition of the English “culture of technological inquisitiveness” within their discussion of Europe’s generally receptive climate for “risk taking and innovation” that “reached its most advanced state in England” (15). The stirrup was invented in the Middle East, but used to effect hundreds of years later by Charles Martel’s knights at Poitiers, they tell us (citing a text that lists neither stirrups nor Martel in the index). But Poitiers is in France. They present no English examples to buttress their hypothesis. Rather they quote from the second paragraph of Jack Gladstone’s 1987 Sociological Theory article, “Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk, and Innovation: The Divergence of East and West in the Early Modern World.”

Gladstone’s article supports their contentions, but his clearest statement focused on their central point is a quote from the work of another scholar.

Britain's leadership over this century [1750-1850] was, it must be emphasized, “not in its possession of a . . . best technique [individual inventions were readily licensed and exported (Gladstone’s emendation)], but in its early forging of a culture which, through innumerable minor innovations . . . induced the best techniques” to become widespread.
Gladstone, 120.

Gladstone identifies as his source: Ian Inkster, "Technology as the Cause of the Industrial Revolution, Some Comments." Journal of European Economic History 12 (1983), 651-57.

Rather than offering a narrative that supports their hypothesis, Schweikart and Allen shift ground to a discussion of the development of property rights in England. Much of the next part of the chapter highlights property rights, and threats to such rights, as they go colony by colony through the British settlements that would ultimately form the United States. Instead of developing their intriguing hypothesis, they offer a narrative that does more to serve early twentieth century conservative politics than to perform the work of history.