Prologue: Piracy in the Historical Literature

Abstract

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 Spain—Spanish America—had 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 Napoleon’s army from 1808 to 1814. During these eventful and sorrowful years, most of Spain’s South American colonies staged revolts. Commerce raiding, legal or otherwise, flourished. Fraud and collusion benefitted the ambitions of avaricious colonial governors. 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.