For a decade before the renewal of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1803, Spain was an ally of France, and during this unique time the American colonies of SpainâSpanish Americaâhad been isolated from the homeland by the British Royal Navy. The shadow of France, and of Napoleon, lay threateningly over the affairs of Spanish America. The liberal ideas of France and the military and naval triumphs of Britain in the Napoleonic Wars contributed to the break-up and fragmentation of Spanish America. Spain endured frightful occupation by Napoleonâs army from 1808 to 1814. During these eventful and sorrowful years, most of Spainâs South American colonies staged revolts. Commerce raiding, legal or otherwise, flourished. Fraud and collusion benefitted the ambitions of avaricious colonial governors.1 In the general absence of local naval units, or guarda-costas, Spanish authorities issued letters of marque and reprisal to privateers, that is, privately owned, and armed merchant ships. Thus evolved a civil war at sea. This gave licensed freedom to attack what little remained of the Armada Real (the Spanish navy) and Spanish commercial shipping, which was now more or less confined to Cuba and Puerto Rico, her sole remaining anchors of empire. Privateers, many of them Baltimore-built schooners, crewed and equipped in the United States, set sail under the flag of Buenos Aires (later Argentina) or Banda Oriental (Uruguay) to ensure the independence of the new republics and to limit Spanish power in the New World.
In response to persistent and numerous attacks by insurgent republics against Spanish commercial shipping in and around Cuba and Puerto Rico (which also included attempted landings of troops), the Spanish government authorized the use of an old weapon that had been used in the Caribbean theatre in the pastâthe corso. The Diccionario MarĂtimo Español of 1831 defined corso as navigation (or voyaging) made in search and persecution of pirates and enemy ships, capturing them when found. The equivalent word in French is âcourseâ and in English âcruise.â Those who engaged in this activity were known as corsarios. A Spanish corsario was one who commanded a ship armed to cruise with a patent from the king or authorized agent. A ship similarly armed and with such a patent was also called a corsario 2. We will meet these terms again, below.
After the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805, so ruinous to Spanish sea power, Spain could deploy only a handful of warships to New World waters, there in order to blockade ports of renegade colonies and to harass foreign ships usurping her traditional trade with her colonies. These same warships also had to protect the commerce of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Spread so thin, Spain issued letters of marque to wealthy merchants of these islands to take as prizes the commercial shipping of the United States and Britain, or indeed any other countries trading with her former colonies without the express permission of Spanish authorities. American shipping was the main target. Of particular importance was defending the cabotage shippingâthat is, the reserved coastal tradeâof Cuba and Puerto Rico. The perpetual harassment of Spain by the ascendant empires of France and England had been a permanent fixture in their inter-imperial struggles that ensued on these Caribbean crossroads. Now a new phase of this had begun.
Cuba and Puerto Rico as Focal Points
In the period under examination, acts of piracy occurred primarily near the coastal towns of San Antonio on the western tip of Cuba and Matanzas east of Havana, in the Mona Passage between Santo Domingo and the western coast of Puerto Rico, and in the passage between Fajardo on the northeast coast of Puerto Rico and the Danish Island of St Thomas. Of all of these, Cabo San Antonio features most in our period. These ports lay adjacent to major shipping lanes. Pirate haunts were situated in shallow coastal waters where winds were light and sailing ships became becalmed and so unable to run from pirates attacking them in small boats. Tricky currents were also exploited by the pirates, as were marshes, river mouths, shallows, reefs, cays, and small islands. Corrupt local officials and merchants who collaborated with the pirates benefitted through the sale of contraband. Pirates conducted business by covert and secret arrangements that were necessitated by the circumstances of being watched, or waited for, by authorities, naval and civil. Messages were passed by visual sign, notably by fires and lights. In other instances, couriers were dispatched to deliver vital information concerning potential prizes and, in other circumstances, to enable measures to be taken to avoid being captured by authorities afloat or ashore. They also employed connections with the legitimate commercial agents of Puerto Rico and Cuba. These pirates acquired, built, or employed piratical craft suitable to the geographical, or environmental, circumstances in which they had to âwage war.â Many criollos, that is, first-generation persons born and raised in Cuba, and also other Europeans in Cuba and Puerto Rico, were embroiled in insurgent actions against Spanish rule in those Islands. Some actions took the form of robbery on land, and others acts of piracy that occurred on and around the coasts of both islands.
The government of Spain and the captains general of Cuba and Puerto Rico had, by the nature of their office, to be against any form of piracy but were slow to react and take defensive measures. Thus, they countenanced illicit trade. Spanish officialdom behaved in this way to mollify as best it could the merchant classes, whose interests had been damaged by loss of the Spanish-American colonies. This loss was accentuated by the sudden influx of wealthy Spanish loyalists, from Spain or from insurgent states, who sought refuge in Cuba and Puerto Rico and who drove up prices and forced peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain) and criollos out from their businesses. Another factor explains the actions, or inaction, of officials: they were slow to act against piracy because such brigandage served their ends in that it did substantial damage to American commercial interests. Indeed, it was primarily the United States that thwarted the re-establishment of Spainâs colonies in the Americas and was threatening the very existence of Spainâs two remaining strongholds in the New World. The British, by contrast, adopted a policy of strict neutrality in diplomatic matters, coupled with an aggressive policy on trade expansion. It was the British merchant and shipper who for decades had conducted much of the illicit trade in Spanish America, using mainly Kingston, Jamaica, as transhipment point. The business of Spanish America could not go on without this British traffic, which, though seen as subversive at the official level, was countenanced as essential. The new world order brought about by the recent wars in Europe and revolution in the Americas now offered the British even greater commercial prospects.3
The struggle for independence mounted in intensity after 1816, and that struggle was also a seaborne oneâfought out on the seas but always in irregular fashion. Patriot privateers attacked neutral ships, believing Spanish contraband to be onboard. Spanish men-of-war captured and detained ships; legal complications ensued. As has been noted by Gerald S. Graham and R.A. Humphreys: âPrivateers, moreover, sometimes turned pirates, and at every port the temptation to honest traders to become smugglers was almost irresistible.â Passions were roused in the search for independence, and foreign interference, notably by the British, was interpreted as a hostile act. âBritain was bound to respect the sovereignty of Spain in America,â continue Graham and Humphreys; âBut she was not prepared to see the continent closed to British trade, and, as the dissentions between mother country and colonies increased, she was anxious to avoid such disruption in Spanish America as might impair the bullion supply and such alienation as might drive the colonies into the arms of France.â Furthermore, as they attest, British capital investment was steadily increasing in Latin America at this time.4 Reconciliation with Spain, therefore, was the policy pursued, though independence of the colonies was regarded as inevitable. Britain could not deal directly with revolutionary authorities; however, in the actions of commanders of Royal Navy ships much of benefit could be accomplishedâthese amphibious plenipotentiaries played key roles, ambiguous ones no doubt. Lord Castlereagh, Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, argued that âin looking to any scheme for liberating South America, it seems indispensable that we should not present ourselves in any other light than as auxiliaries and protectors.â5 This was just as true at Buenos Aires and Montevideo and as in Havana and Puerto Rico. Colonial insurgents and patriots had no desire to exchange the sovereignty of Spain for that of Britain: They wanted their own sovereignty, and there seem to have been far fewer revolutionaries than imitators of Spanish means of control and management. Some insurgent governments established navies, and the celebrated and powerful roles of their commandersâLord Cochrane in the case of Chile and Brazil, and Commodore David Porter for Mexicoâled ultimately to liberation. They do not form part of our story but are indicative of the general flux and convulsions that dominated affairs of this period.
Of the poor in these parts of the New World, very little is known except what may have been passed down through oral history, as few transactions conducted by such people would have been considered of sufficient importance to be documented in the notarial or municipal archives of those islands. The only documents pertaining to these individuals would be those kept by the Roman Catholic Church parish regarding births, deaths, and marriages. Major transactions, such as the purchase and sale of property, loans, and slave sales, were recorded by notaries who made notes of the principals to the transactions; the latter were usually from the merchant and hacendado, or âlanded,â classes. Illegal transactions would not be recorded in this way, nor would they likely show up in the individual books kept by merchants, unless records were kept clandestinely. A merchant who had gone completely rogue would seek to avoid any documentation whatsoever of their activities. Insofar as outlaws were documented in criminal proceedings and military circulars, an opportunity was created to learn something about the pirates and their enablers. This is why Governor Miguel de la Torreâs dragnet to capture Puerto Ricoâs most successful pirate, CofresĂ, created a rare trail of records of the life of a pirate. Nevertheless, even for this most notorious and legendary of pirate leaders, the documentation remains patchy and the record of his trial was mysteriously âremovedâ from the General Archives of Puerto Rico.
The struggle between Spain and the United States climaxed with the Fajardo (or Foxardo) affair. Beneath the surface lay the threat of military force but great efforts were made, as was also the case between Spain and Britain, to contain the conflict within a legal framework and, if not within the bounds of international law, then within the bounds of legal argument. The Spanish-British joint commissions on prize ship adjudication illustrated a case in point for keeping the inter-imperial rivalry out of the realm of outright war. When London threatened war against Spain in 1824 and sent a Royal Navy squadron to the Caribbean over Spanish non-action to compensate English claimants for illegally taken prizes, the Spanish grudgingly started moving the claims process forward through the bilateral commission. No such bilateral mechanism to settle prize claims existed between Spain and the United States, between whom most of the prize taking and damage was occurring, either directly or through the surrogates of the new Latin American republics whose privateering vessels were manned by Americans and outfitted in American ports.
As will be seen, in the duel that emerged between US Commodore Porter and Governor of Puerto Rico Miguel de la Torre, both men attempted to justify their actions within a legal framework. Porter was a self-starting agent of American expansion, who, like many of his contemporaries, sought to carve out for himself a place at the table of American figures such as Andrew Jackson. De la Torre, a former Governor of Venezuela, was sent to Puerto Rico to continue the fight for Spain as both governor and captain general of the island. This clash at Fajardo resulted in Porterâs dismissal by the president of the United States for overstepping his authority in attempting to foment another insurrection in Puerto Rico, and in the success of del la Torreâs rear-guard action to keep Puerto Rico within the Spanish empire.
The result of this undeclared war was that the United States put an end to the depredations against her merchant shipping by pirates emanating from those islands. Moreover, Britain completed the break-up of Spainâs mercantile monopoly over Spainâs South American colonies that provided a vital outlet for British manufactured goods. These new markets spurred Britainâs nascent industrial revolution and rising financial power. With Britain renouncing territorial ambitions in the Western Hemisphere and the United States gladly accepting capital flows from the City of London to fund her western expansion, we see the consolidation of the transatlantic partnership that continues to this day. Much of this investment was redirected to the United States from Britainâs new Latin American trade.
In the circumstances, could Imperial Spain have intervened and re-established its ancient rule in the Americas? The fact of the matter is that periodic political convulsions at home made it unfeasible for Spain to mount any real efforts to re-assert it militarily in her former colonies. The underlying pressures that created Cuban- and Puerto Rican-based piracy continued long after piracy had been suppressed by American and British actions against it and, it must be noted, a nominal Spanish determination to curb it by 1825. Piracy was only largely stamped out in 1835, with the successful prosecution in Boston of the pirate crew of the Panda. Even after 1835, foreign and local pressures to engage in piracy continued to seethe and occasionally exploded, requiring a naval response from the United States. The LĂłpez affair against Cuba of 1850 provides a case in point: it was an American filibustering expedition that the Spanish administration of Cuba deemed to be an act of piracy and for which punishment was meted out.
The Historiographical Legacy
Almost any act of piracy during our epoch can be put into context within an overarching pattern of pillage revealing the struggle between the United States and Spain for dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, although asserting that the United States would not tolerate any foreign power in the Western Hemisphere, was really an endorsement of the new republics of Latin America and a back-handed warning to Spain not to return to the Americas, although she tried several timesâthe last attempt being her landing of troops in Tampico, MĂ©xico in 1829. That force had been marshalled in Cuba. By identifying major turning points in the fight against piracy from different sources and then putting them together, the primary evidence that exists in many archives becomes more useful to the researcher and pirate history enthusiast alike. The nature of the system of Caribbean piracy during the period under study and its causes are also revealed for the first time; many disparate events thus become part of a logical whole. What theories are we to use to understand this epoch of piracy between 1815 and 1837? In regard to naval history, this work stands on the shoulders of giants. The authors are indebted to the theoretical works of Mathew McCarthy; Frederic C. Lane, Alejandro Colas and Bryan Mabee; Stefan Eklöf Amirell and Leos Muller; and Bruce Ellemen, Andrew Forbes and David Rosenberg, all of which help to place the phenomenon of piracy in an intelligible historical context. The works of Robert J. Antony, Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker, and legal authority Alfred Rubin are also instructive.
In Antonyâs book Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas, affairs in the South China Sea are described which are similar to those that took place in the Caribbean a decade later. There, piracy was used to gain a more equitable share of trade. To evade burdensome taxation by the Chinese state, a parallel illicit economy developed with its own unsanctioned ports, where no state revenues could be collected. In this economy, local merchants fenced goods, while networks of accomplices everywhere made such action possible. Ransom payments and protection fees were the primary source of income. The pirates had their own communication system, and relied on geographic and kinship ties useful in the gathering of commercial information. A parallel distribution system also developed, which reached into smaller markets; and many captains preferred to unload their cargoes at ports where no records were kept. Piracy in the South China Seas during this period also created employment for coastal residents. Like the pirates themselves, the people with whom they traded were ordinary fishermen, sailors, and petty entrepreneurs. They built strongholds not only on remote islands but also in commercial and political hubs, where they collected tribute and ransom; they also conspired with soldiers and officials who were on their payrolls. Ellemen, Forbes and Rosenbergâs Piracy and Maritime Crime: Historical and Modern Case Studies overlays this piracy with imperial and dynastic struggles. According to them, there was an outbreak of piracy in the South China Seas, flowing from the dynastic warfare occurring in China that Britain was exploiting for its political and economic benefi...