Portal:Piracy/Selected article/March 2008

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The great era of Piracy in the Caribbean began in the 1560s and died out in the 1720s as the nation-states of Western Europe with colonies in the Americas began to exert more state control over the waterways of the New World. The period during which pirates were most successful was from the 1640s until the 1680s. Piracy flourished in the Caribbean because of British seaports such as Port Royal in Jamaica and the French settlement at Tortuga.

Piracy in the Caribbean came out of the interplay of larger international trends in the early modern period. The Caribbean had become a center of European trade and colonization after Columbus’ discovery of the New World for Europeans in 1492. In the 1493 Treaty of Tordesillas the non-European world had been divided between the Spanish and the Portuguese along a north-south line 270 leagues west of the Cape Verde. This gave Spain control of the Americas, a position the Spaniards later reinforced with an equally unenforceable papal bull. On the Spanish Main, the key early settlements were Cartagena in present-day Colombia, Porto Bello and Panama City on the Isthmus of Panama, Santiago on the southeastern coast of Cuba, and Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish were mining staggering amounts of silver bullion from the mines of Zacatecas in New Spain (Mexico) and Potosí in Peru (actually now located in Bolivia). The huge Spanish silver shipments from the New World to the Old attracted pirates and privateers, both in the Caribbean and across the Atlantic, all along the route from the Caribbean to Seville. (more...)