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Sail Bags and Black Flags Identifying Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Pirates: Exploring the Archaeology of Piracy
Book chapter

Sail Bags and Black Flags Identifying Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Pirates: Exploring the Archaeology of Piracy

Jessie Cragg and Michael Thomin
Dead Man's Chest: Exploring the Archaeology of Piracy, pp.27-36
University Press of Florida
01/2023
Web of Science ID: WOS:001154062100004

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Abstract

Excerpt from text - On May 14, 1794, Spanish captain Bartolome de Aranguren and his crew set sail on San Juan Nepomuceno from Florida to Matanzas. On June 3 the ship departed from Cuba to transport a cargo of corn back to Florida. Less than a week into the voyage, two boats crewed by thirty Anglo-American pirates (de Aranguren 1794) captured their ship near Key Biscayne. Several days later, a French privateer overtook the pirates and Aranguren’s captive crew and transported them all to Charleston as suspected pirates. The Admiralty Courts cleared up the misunderstanding, freeing Aranguren while executing the pirates, but on the return journey south his men were once again captured by a French privateer (de Aranguren 1794). San Juan Nepomuceno’s voyage should have originally taken a few weeks, but it spanned nearly five months. In that single voyage the crew members were captured three separate times. While this might seem like an extraordinary series of events, it was all too common during the Age of Revolution. From the 1780s to the 1830s, a brutal wave of maritime crime erupted in the Caribbean and along the Gulf Coast. Both privateers and coastal bandits took advantage of a fluctuating political climate, spawning an intense period of piratical acts that are relatively understudied. These men were vastly different from the Golden Age buccaneers who conducted large-scale fleet operations. These pirates were adept sailors who preferred guerrilla warfare, often from a terrestrial base of operations. Difficult for contemporaries to locate even at the time of their raiding, these groups are enigmas archaeologically. One of the best hopes of identifying associated sites is through the corroborating documentary evidence.

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