Gallery · The End of the Golden Age · Room 5 of 9
The Machinery
The exhibit
The statutes are the exhibit, shown as their operative clauses. Two are quoted from the acts themselves and one phrase is quoted from the printed commission that a colonial court read aloud in 1726. The naval half of the machinery, the station ships and cruisers, exists mainly as Admiralty papers at Kew, and the room says so rather than dressing a thin record as a full one.
The court that hanged the Auger company had to sit somewhere, under some law. That law was built two decades earlier. The Piracy Act of 1698, 11 William III chapter 7, "An Act for the more effectual Suppression of Piracy", let the Crown try piracy overseas by a vice-admiralty commission court rather than shipping the accused home to England. The court had to be at least seven persons, merchants, factors, planters or naval officers, and the Act made those who aid, abet, receive or conceal pirates liable to the same capital punishment as the pirates themselves. Every colonial pirate trial in this Collection sat under that Act.
The 1698 Act was not one-off. It was continued and made perpetual, and the room credits the perpetuation exactly as the 1726 Boston court's own printed commission stated it, no more and no less.
"made perpetual by an act of the sixth of King George"
That is the safe statement, and it is deliberately careful. The perpetuation is credited by the period print to an act of the sixth of King George; the Transportation Act of 1717, 4 George I chapter 11, carried a piracy-suppression section, but the exact way that section and the perpetuating act interlock is not settled from the statute text, so the room does not assert that 4 George I chapter 11 made the 1698 Act perpetual. Probable
Then the state sharpened the machinery. The Piracy Act of 1721, 8 George I chapter 24, "An Act for the more effectual suppressing of Piracy", went after the trade that kept pirates alive. Its first section made it piracy, felony and robbery to trade with, supply, fit out vessels for, or consult and correspond with known pirates: the fences and chandlers, not only the men at sea. Its sixth section turned on the merchant marine itself, providing that a commander, officer or mariner of a gunned merchant ship who failed to defend it against a pirate attack forfeited all his wages, could not recover them in any court, and suffered six months imprisonment.
Treat the trials, then, as instruments and not only as records. The court was a device the state had built and could aim, and the 1721 Act conscripted every armed merchantman into the fight. The end of the Golden Age theme gallery carries the full statute census; what this room adds is that reading, the courtroom as a tool, and the honesty about its weakest strand. The naval force that was meant to work alongside the law is the least documented of the four instruments, and only one action, the Swallow's, is firmly carried. The gallows the machinery fed is the next room.