Most people think privateers were a short-lived and nasty phenomenon of the eighteenth century. “State- sponsored piracy” is a phrase commonly used to describe those whom governments licensed to prey on enemy shipping. At the very least, that is an over-simplification.
Privateering began in the Middle Ages, in the twelfth century, and it was still going on at the dawn of the twentieth century. Only a palaeontologist would call that short-lived. It began as a way to allow sea-going merchants of one country to compensate themselves for being “injured” by citizens of another country. They could ask for “a letter of marque and reprisal” -a licence to seize a ship belonging to the offending country, sell it and pocket the proceeds.
That changed as time went by. Countries realised that privateers could be used to inflict economic damage on their enemies, and it became the norm that privateering licences were issued only in time of war. There were two types of licence available to private shipping interests. A letter of marque was a ship normally carrying cargo, but it was also permitted to seize enemy vessels if the opportunity presented itself. A privateer was a ship whose purpose was to seize enemy ships. Privateers were usually smaller and faster than letters of marque, and they relied not so much on heavy armament to carry the day but on bluff, audacity and, often, an unusually numerous crew to overcome their prey. (A ship that would normally carry a crew of 20 might, as a privateer, sail with five or six times as many.) They were distinct from pirates, in that their aim was not to sink ships, but to capture them for profit, a process much less destructive to human life and property than either piracy or naval action.
Further, two rules of the game acted to prevent excesses. First, those involved followed a code of practice. Donald Petrie, in his book The Prize Game: Lawful Looting on the High Seas in the Days of Fighting Sail (Naval Institute Press), says the great majority of privateers were characterised by “a decent, civilised greed…. Like sportsmen, privateers played by a code of rules.” Deception played a large part in what they did. They carried false papers. They flew false flags. They disguised themselves. But, Petrie says, “They never fired a gun under false colours.”
Second, every country involved in privateering operated a prize court (there was an active one in Bermuda during the eighteenth century), which adjudicated every privateer’s claim to a seized ship and its cargo. It happened very often that such a court would refuse a claim and set the ship in question free if it found that it belonged to a neutral country, for example, or if its cargo was owned and consigned to neutrals.
Those who took part in privateering were guaranteed nothing. But there was a possibility that they might share in very large profits. The ships they captured were sold. Their cargoes were sold. The seamen who became their prisoners could sometimes be ransomed. And the profit could be shared among the owners, the officers and the men of the victorious privateer.
Was the practice a success? Any tactic of war that lasts for eight centuries can only be described as a roaring success. The literature is full of statistics demonstrating the harm done to the other side’s shipping, economy and morale by privateers; it is also full of references to the large profits that were made by the sailors and their backers. The practice was a powerful weapon of war. Indeed, it is now more or less an accepted fact that privateers won the American War of Independence for the thirteen colonies, despite what is claimed on behalf of General George Washington and others. The colonies were fighting the English on a shoestring. Relying on privateers for supplies and to inflict damage on the enemy must have been one of, if not the most successful, outsourcing exercises in history.
Statistics can vary quite dramatically from author to author at this remove. But in the literature, an often-repeated claim is that there were 31 ships in the Continental Navy at the onset of the American Revolution and 64 ships at the height of the war, all of which captured 196 enemy vessels. By contrast, there were some 1,700 American privateers, which captured 2,283 enemy ships. Those are eloquent facts, indeed.
