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

Jessie Cragg; Michael Thomin

Excerpt from test - 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. 28 · Jessie Cragg and Michael Thomin Context Following the War of 1812, a resurgence of maritime crime occurred (Gibbs 2012:83). Several factors, including the Napoleonic Wars and Latin American wars of independence, created a lawless frontier area in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Resulting economic conditions in the United States pushed former privateers south to accept commissions from Latin American revolutionaries fighting against Spanish rule (Davis 2006:70). When Spain lost its ability to control overseas territories, a period of weakened authority along the southern coast of the United States created an environment amenable to piracy. As Spain’s power waned in the Western Hemisphere, the United States began accelerating its naval program. A quasi-war with France initiated a wave of increased naval construction as a means of extending diplomacy and projecting confidence as a new country (Crawford and Hughes 1995). During the War of 1812, the United States began relying heavily on supplementing its forces with privateers. At least 100,000 Americans found employment through privateering during the war (Kert 2015:38). At war’s end, these 100,000 people lost their revenue stream. With armed ships but no war to fight, the privateers needed a new plan. Coupled with out-of-work merchants in prominent cities such as Baltimore, a class of “patriot privateers” emerged: vessels sailed south to accept commissions from Latin American revolutionaries while fencing their stolen cargo through American merchants (Hopkins 2008). Patriot privateers generally followed the laws of the sea, only seizing prizes that were at war with their commissioning nation-state. Taking liberties with their authority became increasingly common, however, as the rebellions dragged on. Eventually, maritime predations began impacting United States commerce, provoking backlash from the US Navy. While piracy was always outlawed by the United States, the justified use of privateers as an auxiliary to the regular navy increased the number of sailors versed in the practice of capturing ships and their cargos at sea. The initial authorization of privateering created a popular path for out-of-work sailors whose normal operations were interrupted by conflict. With so many vessels armed and operating under letters of marque or commissions, a natural progression in seeking prizes outside of their authority occurred with more frequency. By then the United States was struggling to author a policy that would combat piracy but not condemn its own citizens in acts of maritime crime (Cragg 2019:34–35).

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

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

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