A handsome pirate captain who seeks only to right some wrong is pitted against an evil governor. A beautiful servant girl takes up a man’s disguise and goes to sea to avenge her father’s death at the hands of corrupt government officials. A poor but honest seaman, is driven by an unscrupulous captain to mutiny, and is then forced to defend his misunderstood actions against the authorities. And everything always ends happily. These are the images we have of pirates today, thanks mainly to Hollywood.
To Colonial Virginians, however, piracy was not so happy or pretty. Like terrorists of our modern world, pirates during their lifetime, were looked upon as men who would maim and kill anyone who got in their way. Through the intervening years, between the “golden age of piracy” and today, these robbers of the sea have taken on a legendary charm, which they never knew personally. Romantic novels, films, and children’s stories have all served to blur the reality of their time and situation.
Piracy can be traced back as far as man’s first ventures away from land and onto the sea. The plundering of innocent merchant ships by pirates occurred among the ancient Greeks and Romans and still continues in the Twenty-first century. Indeed, the word pirate comes from the Latin pirata, which in turn comes from the Greek peira, and has been interpreted as “one who makes attempts or attacks on ships.”
By the time that the first English settlers arrived in Virginia, at Jamestown in 1607, piracy had been a problem for the Spanish in the New World for over a hundred years, mostly because of English pirates or “sea dogs.” Indeed, the Spanish Ambassador to England had warned King Phillip III in Madrid that he feared the new Virginia colony would become a haven for pirates as “the place is so perfect for piratical excursions that Your Majesty will not be able to bring silver from the Indies without finding a very great obstacle there, and that they will ruin the trade of Your Majesty’s vassals…”
The early Virginians, however, faced enough problems just surviving and as the new colony of Virginia tenuously took root, it soon faced its own problem with pirates. The first recorded instance of pirates appears in 1610 amidst the “starving time” at Jamestown. By the mid-seventeenth century, Virginians were contending with Dutch, French, and Spanish raiders that began to prey on its ships in the rivers, creeks, inlets, and great Chesapeake Bay. Between the years 1680 and 1730, the colony suffered a “plague” of piracy, which was only ended by the strong efforts of the British Navy. Even then it continued on a smaller scale until the Revolutionary War when British ships themselves acted as privateers against the new State of Virginia. Throughout the colonial period, piracy was a threat to be reckoned with. This compendium is an effort to catalogue the known facts, in quick reference form, of the pirates that once ravaged the shipping and coasts of Colonial Virginia.
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