Careening and the Haven Economy

Careening is the maintenance of a wooden hull without a dry dock: hauling a ship over on her side against a beach so that half the bottom lifts clear at a time to be cleaned and re-sealed. Around the places where they did it grew a trade in provisions, powder, stolen cargo and protection.

Fouling, worm and speed

The shipworm Teredo navalis, described as a boring bivalve mollusc rather than a true worm, tunnels through submerged timber and can destroy a hull from within if left unchecked. See shipworm and hull repair.¹

For a predator that lived by overhauling prey and outrunning warships, a fouled bottom cost them that edge, which is why the practice mattered more to pirates than to most other seafarers. Copper sheathing, the eventual answer, came with the Royal Navy's adoption from the 1760s. Before it, careening was the principal defence against both fouling and the worm.

Cape Lopez, 1722

At Cape Lopez some 272 men are reckoned taken, and 52 of the 54 condemned were later hanged.

The haven economy

The smoothly working "haven economy" is a frame laid on the record by later writers rather than a documented institution. Much of the colour of life ashore comes down from Johnson's General History of 1724. The popular image of the careening beach owes a good deal to fiction as well, most recently to television drama.

Consequences for suppression

Careening tied piracy to land. A ship whose strength was speed had to stop, disarm and expose herself periodically, and only certain coasts would serve, coasts that also held the buyers. Closing New Providence under Woodes Rogers in 1718 took away the maintenance ground and the market together. See naval suppression, the end of the Golden Age and prizes and fencing.

What the sources cannot yet give is the ordinary detail of the work: no log records successive careens of one pirate hull, so how often a bottom was cleaned stays an inference from the rate of fouling; no recipe survives for what any named crew payed a hull with; and haven populations rest on estimates rather than musters. The Cape Lopez total of 272 men taken is a reconstruction rather than a printed figure, where the 52 of 54 hanged is the count the 1723 trial print tabulates.