Index
Institutions
The companies, courts, boards and navies whose paperwork made the age and ended it: what each was, what it did about piracy, and where its records sit.
- Institution The Board of Admiralty The standing commission of noblemen, politicians and sea officers who jointly executed the office of Lord High Admiral and governed the operational Royal Navy, stationing ships, instructing commanders, ordering convoys and running naval discipline. It directed the naval war on the golden-age pirates without ever trying or pardoning one.
- Institution The Board of Trade The English, and from 1707 British, advisory board for colonial commerce and government, created by royal commission on 15 May 1696, which gathered the governors' reports of piracy and advised the Crown on the trade and government of the plantations.
- Institution The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa The regulated company constituted by the Africa Act of 1750, open to individual British traders for a fee, barred from corporate trading, and governed by nine annually elected representatives of London, Bristol and Liverpool.
- Institution The East India Company The English, later British, joint-stock company chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600 to monopolise the East Indies trade, holding fortified factories at Surat, Bombay, Madras and in Bengal and wielding delegated powers of war, fortification and jurisdiction, and so the principal English corporate victim, complainant and lobbyist of the Red Sea piracy of the 1690s after Henry Every took the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695.
- Institution The Colonial Governor The governor of a British American colony, who from the 1690s to the 1720s commissioned pirate-hunters, granted the King's pardon where he was commissioned to do so, and convened and constituted the colonial courts that tried captured pirates.
- Institution The High Court of Admiralty The English court whose judge was a civilian appointed by patent and whose Admiralty Sessions, sitting under royal commission at the Old Bailey, tried, condemned and hanged pirates of the golden age; after the Piracy Act 1698 such trials could also be held in vice-admiralty courts in the colonies, and the court lasted until 1875.
- Institution The Privy Council and the Secretaries of State The King in Council and the Principal Secretaries of State. The pardon proclamations of 1717 and 1718, the commissions superseding a governor of Jamaica and the orders repealing colonial Acts all reached the plantations through them, and whenever the King was out of the kingdom the Lords Justices did the same work in his name.
- Institution Newgate, the Marshalsea and Admiralty Execution The gaols, courts and gallows through which the English Crown put men accused of piracy: Newgate and the Marshalsea, which held them; the Admiralty sessions at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey and, after 1700, the courts of seven commissioners that the Act for the more effectual suppression of piracy allowed the Crown to call overseas; and execution between the tide marks, at Execution Dock in Wapping or within the flood marks under a castle wall, with the bodies of some afterwards hung in chains.
- Institution The Royal African Company The English company that held the castles and factories of the Guinea coast at its own charge and kept the trade to itself until a statute of 1698 opened it to any subject paying ten per cent towards the forts. Its chief fort at Cape Coast was where Bartholomew Roberts's captured crew were tried in 1722.
- Institution The Royal Navy The fleet, its officers and its men, which under Board of Admiralty direction furnished the armed force used against the golden-age pirates through colonial station ships, convoy escorts and occasional dedicated hunting cruises, and which was the arresting arm of a system whose courts Parliament had built.
- Institution The South Sea Company The British chartered joint-stock corporation of 1711, created to convert and manage a large tranche of the national debt and holding from 1713 the Spanish Asiento to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America, whose shares drove the South Sea Bubble of 1720; a slave-trading and Atlantic commercial interest of the pirate years rather than an organ of piracy suppression.
- Institution The Colonial Vice-Admiralty Courts The standing English, later British, maritime tribunals seated across the overseas plantations, together with the special commissioned courts of admiralty that under the piracy statute of 1698 to 1700 could try, condemn and execute pirates in the colonies without a jury and without sending them to England.
- Institution The House of Commons The elected lower chamber of the Parliament of England to 1707 and of Great Britain thereafter, sole grantor of supply and the body that enacted the piracy statutes of 1700 and 1721 while holding no power to try, commission or deploy.
- Institution The French East India Company The chartered French corporation created by Louis XIV in August 1664 on Colbert's design, holding a fifty year monopoly of French navigation and trade from the Cape of Good Hope eastward to the Strait of Magellan with establishments at Surat, Pondicherry, Chandernagore and Ile Bourbon, whose protective passes were the substance of William Kidd's defence and whose colony at Ile Bourbon regulated the retirement of pirates by amnesty.
- Institution The Mughal Imperial Administration The central imperial government of the Timurid house in India, a land empire with no navy of its own, whose pilgrim and trading shipping out of Surat made it the principal victim of the Pirate Round and which, by embargo and hostage ashore, forced the European companies to police the sea.
- Institution The Customs Service The English, and from 1707 British, revenue department for duties on goods carried by sea, governed by the Board of Customs re-established at London in 1671 and staffed by collectors, comptrollers, surveyors, searchers and waiters in the home ports and, from the 1670s, in the American and West Indian colonies, the Commissioners being empowered to appoint plantation officers directly by the Plantation Trade Act of 1696.
- Institution Private Shipyards and Victuallers The private maritime-industrial base of the English and colonial Atlantic between 1690 and 1725, comprising the merchant building yards of the Thames and the outports, the proprietors of commercial wet docks, and the victuallers, chandlers, ropemakers, sailmakers and coopers who stored and fitted ships for sea, touching piracy as the builder of the hulls the pirates took, the supplier of the hulls that hunted them, and the whole apparatus a pirate could not use.
- Institution The London Merchant Networks The unincorporated and overlapping trading communities of the City of London engaged in the plantation, African and Eastern commerce between 1690 and 1725, holding no charter, seal, membership roll or jurisdiction, and comprising the separate traders to Africa, the West India and Chesapeake merchants, the private interests behind the chartered companies and the financiers of privateering ventures.
- Institution The New York Merchant Networks The unincorporated commercial community of the port of New York between about 1690 and 1725, comprising the owners, part-owners, freighters, masters and supercargoes of the town's shipping with their London and Caribbean correspondents, holding no charter, no seal and no jurisdiction, and exercising authority only through the Crown offices its members held, which in the 1690s supplied the Madagascar pirates with stores and brought home their plunder alongside enslaved people bought on the Madagascar coast.
- Institution The Caribbean Plantation Economies The sugar economies of the English, and from 1707 British, Caribbean colonies, worked by indentured servants and enslaved Africans, taxed by Parliament and by the island assemblies, and preyed on by pirates whose markets and recruits they also supplied.
- Institution The Atlantic Insurance Markets The market that carried the sea risks of the Atlantic trades, whose policy was a stamped instrument of law from 1698 and whose rates rose with the depredations of the pirates.
- Institution The Old Bailey Criminal Court The criminal court of the City of London and the County of Middlesex, sitting under royal commissions of the peace, of oyer and terminer, and of gaol delivery of Newgate at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey, whose room, gaol, juries and printers served the Admiralty sessions that tried pirates without the court itself ever holding jurisdiction over piracy.
- Institution Colonial Militias and Private Defence Not one institution but the armed force the English, and from 1707 British, American and Caribbean colonies could raise out of themselves, comprising the statutory militia of each colony with its musters, watches, forts and harbour batteries, the vessels a governor commissioned into private hands against pirates, the sloops a colony hired, pressed or fitted out at the public charge, and the unlicensed self-defence of merchant crews and forced men.