Under the Bloody Flag (50 page)

The activities of disorderly men-of-war and pirates threatened English commercial and diplomatic interests in the Mediterranean. Early in 1601 the Duke of Florence was reported to have arrested English goods in Leghorn and Pisa in retaliation for the seizure of a vessel claimed by his subjects. Reports of attacks on Turkish vessels weakened the position of English merchants at Constantinople. Later in the year, further complaints concerning the spoil of a Turkish vessel led to the arrest of English merchants at Tripoli. Prominent London merchants, such as William Garway, expressed concern at the disruption and damage to their trade with the Levant.
¹²⁵

In order to deal with the problem, during 1600 the regime tried to regulate English men-of-war, sailing on voyages of reprisal, which entered the Mediterranean. At the same time consuls and merchant representatives in the Levant, such as Matthew Stocker who was based at Patras, were ordered to arrest English vessels sailing without a special licence from the Queen or the Lord Admiral. In March 1602, following further complaints against disorderly spoil and piracy, the Queen sent one of her vessels into the Mediterranean to hunt for pirates. Such measures were ineffective. Indeed, they only served to emphasize the piratical conduct of men-of-war who operated independently from bases that included Patras, Coron and Modon, as well as Algiers and Tunis. Thus Stocker informed the English ambassador at Constantinople that he was unable to do anything against the captains who frequented the port, because the local ruler was their confederate and received a share of the plunder.
¹²⁶

English depredation thus remained a problem within the Mediterranean until the end of the reign. It included a diverse mix of disorderly men-of-war and hard-bitten pirates or rovers who were in danger of being perceived as renegades. English merchants at Zante insisted that the sea robbers were outlaws, for whom they could not be held responsible. According to the report of March 1603 by the captain of an English ship at Zante, there were twelve men-of-war based at Tunis whose companies ‘were all exiles from England, in disgrace with the Queen, and being driven to desperation they are resolved to plunder all and sundry whom they may fall in with, even those of their own nation’.
¹²⁷
This peculiar and ill-fitting collection of rovers included Captain William Piers and Sir Thomas Sherley and his brother, who acquired notorious reputations in parts of the Mediterranean during the early seventeenth century. Piers came from Plymouth, reputedly of a wealthy background. He sailed in a well-armed vessel, carrying twenty ordnance, with a company of between seventy and eighty men, who included William Lancaster, ‘a man of evil fame and little or no substance’. Piers operated independently at sea from various bases. In 1603 he plundered the
Veniera
, near Zante, laden with a rich cargo belonging to Venetian merchants. According to the report he married a Turkish wife, who benefited from gifts of silk dresses and sequins. When taxed by one English captain, ‘that he had ruined the Levant trade and earned a halter’, allegedly he retorted ‘I may as well lose my life for a lot as for a little; and I would have done more if I could’.
¹²⁸

If the career of Piers foreshadowed the emergence of a new breed of pirate who would flourish after 1604, the activities of the Sherley brothers appeared to represent the dying species of the gentleman adventurer. The poorly organized, erratic and often wild enterprises of such promoters brought little profit or honour to their leaders. Sir Thomas Sherley came from a financially troubled, landed background. During the later 1590s he turned to sea venturing in an attempt to restore his fortune, raiding the coast of Spain with a fleet of six vessels. In 1602 he ventured into the Mediterranean with his brother and several ships. Following the disintegration of the fleet, he led a desperate and abortive attack in early 1603 against the island of Kea. He was captured and imprisoned by the Turks. On his release in December 1605 he returned to England, where his financial troubles continued. Thereafter he sold his family lands, ‘married a whore’ and secured a small sinecure as a royal park keeper on the Isle of Wight.
¹²⁹

The growing lawlessness at sea during the later years of the war was partly the result of too many predators in search of too few prizes. In 1603 one of Cecil’s captains, Joseph May, reported a striking lack of lawful prey along the coast of Spain. As there ‘was little trade by Spaniards … for the most part our English men-of-war do make their voyages upon the French. All sailors of late’, he added, ‘are fallen into such vile order that they shame not to say that they go to sea to rob all nations, and unless the captain consent thereto, he is not fit for this time’.
¹³⁰
During one later voyage, May’s company grew discontented and mutinous, threatening to stow him under the hatches following the seizure of a French vessel reportedly carrying a cargo worth £10,000, which he released ‘without diminishing one penny’.

Conditions during the later 1590s reinforced an underlying trend towards the emergence of organized deep-sea piracy which depended on overseas bases and markets. This development, which was especially evident in the Mediterranean, overshadowed the lingering persistence of traditional forms of depredation around the British Isles. While local piracy, as such, was not eradicated, it was much reduced in volume and intensity, bearing the characteristics of a marginalized activity undertaken by fugitives whose activities were both elusive and fragmentary.

Nevertheless, small groups of pirates operated intermittently during the later years of the war. They were involved in small-scale, opportunistic piracy and sea roving. As an enterprise that was distinct from the disorderly actions of ships sailing on voyages of reprisal, it continued to attract the attention of the regime. In February 1596 the council heard a complaint concerning the arrest in Scotland of the
Hopewell
of Dunwich by Patrick Stewart, the lord of the Orkney Islands, ‘upon pretence of some wrongs done him … by Gwin, an English pirate and fugitive’.
¹³¹
One year later it dealt with the complaints of two merchants against Matthew Drew and other pirates, who boarded a vessel in the night at Christmas time, and spoiled it of iron. In May 1597 it was informed of an act of piracy by Captain Thomas Venables and company on the
John
of Waterford. The plunder, including goods owned by Thomas Butler, 10
th
Earl of Ormond, was later sold in the Isle of Man and at Chester. Several months later it pardoned George Green, who was accused of piracy for stealing two anchors and two cables valued at forty shillings. In August it ordered the arrest of a group of pirates, as well as the buyers and receivers of their goods, in south Devon. Another warrant for the apprehension of pirates, who spoiled the
Judith
of Guernsey of a cargo of Newfoundland fish, followed in January 1598.
¹³²

Several years later there were signs of a revival in Ireland of coastal raiding by Gaelic rovers, who had previously been identified as rebels as well as pirates. In October 1600 a Scottish trader was spoiled by Tibbot ne Long, the son of Grainne O’Malley, along the coast of Mayo. Yet the activities of such raiders were circumscribed by the presence of one of the Queen’s ships, the
Tremontana
, under the command of Captain Charles Plessington, which was patrolling the coast of Connacht and Ulster to prevent the supply of rebel forces by Spain. During a cruise of two months in 1601, the only vessel sighted by Plessington was a galley ‘with thirty oars, and … 100 good shot’, sent out by the O’Malleys on a raiding voyage against the McSweeneys around Lough Swilly and Sheep Haven.
¹³³
It was forced ashore after a brief skirmish with the English. The decline of this form of sea raiding did not indicate an end to Irish piracy or roving. In November 1601 a Scottish ship was taken, near the harbour of Cork, by Captain Myagh, Walter Bethell and others. For Myagh this was the start of a piratical career which was to flourish after 1603, sometimes in association with English pirates who returned to haunt the coast of south-west Ireland following the war with Spain.
¹³⁴

During these same years, however, English men-of-war and pirates faced increasing competition from a growing number of overseas rovers, especially of Dutch and Flemish origin. Dutch privateering vessels provided strong competition for the English, particularly in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. In January 1599 the Dutch were reported ‘to laugh to see the English … keep this river [at Lisbon], while they may take the Indies’.
¹³⁵
More alarmingly, men-of-war from Dunkirk, sailing under Spanish authority, made sweeping raids along the east coast, occasionally straying into the Irish Sea, disrupting local and coasting trades. Sailing in packs of three or four vessels, and occasionally operating in larger fleets of between nine and twelve, the Dunkirkers dramatically exposed the vulnerability of English waters to external attack. Their growing presence along the east coast aroused fears that they intended a landing at Scarborough in 1599 and an assault on Harwich the following year.
¹³⁶

The war with Spain was still raging when Elizabeth died in March 1603. Her successor, James VI of Scotland, brought the conflict to an end with the peace of 1604. The sea war had been a formative experience for English maritime enterprise, with profound consequences for its predatory aspects. It encouraged a rapid and sustained growth of privateering, under the guise of reprisal venturing, which seemed to be accompanied by a decline in piracy. Yet this surprising development was more apparent than real. The organization and operation of the sea war, based on a dynamic but unstable coalition between public and private interests, led to widespread disorderly spoil and plunder. The way in which the conflict was conducted also confused the distinction between piracy and lawful depredation. Even in its dying days, adventurers of varied backgrounds, such as Pierce Griffith in north Wales, embarked on unlicensed voyages during which neutral shipping was subject to spoil or capture. Griffith’s attack on a vessel of Hamburg was followed by his seizure at Cork, and his subsequent trial and imprisonment. John Ward of Plymouth, who earned renown and infamy during the reign of James I as a pirate who ‘turned Turk’, was also involved in piracy on the ‘Spanishe seas’, which included the plunder of French and Danish ships.
¹³⁷
Over the course of the long war with Spain, therefore, reprisal enterprise served to re-direct and re-shape piratical activity. But the scale of the ensuing assault on overseas shipping earned the English an unenviable reputation as a nation of pirates among maritime communities across Europe.

Notes

    
1.
  The war created a myth of naval power in which English sea power was expressed as the ‘nation in arms’. N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Myth of Sea–Power in English History’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
, Sixth Series
,
14 (2004), pp. 156–7; Loades,
England’s Maritime Empire
, pp. 122–31.

    
2.
  J.S. Corbett (ed.),
Papers relating to the Navy during the Spanish War 1585
–
1587
(Navy Records Society, 11, 1898), p. 36;
Law and Custom
, I, pp. 236–41.

    
3.
  Andrews,
Elizabethan Privateering
, pp. 22–31;
Law and Custom
, I, p. 251; R.W. Kenny,
Elizabeth’s Admiral: The Political Career of Charles Howard Earl of Nottingham 1536
–
1624
(Baltimore, 1970), pp. 44–8, 67–71.

    
4.
  Corbett (ed.),
Spanish War
, p. 35. Flood or Fludd was sailing with a commission from Don Antonio in 1584,
Calendar
, pp. 50–2.

    
5.
  Andrews,
Elizabethan Privateering
, pp. 96–7; D.B. Quinn (ed.),
The Roanoke Voyages 1584
–
1590
, 2 vols. (Hakluyt Society, Second Series, 104 & 105, 1955), I, pp. Ix, 24–32; I.A. Wright (ed.),
Further English Voyages to Spanish America 1583
–
1594
(Hakluyt Society, Second Series, 94, 1951), pp. 46, 195; G.T. Cell,
English Enterprise in Newfoundland 1577
–
1660
(Toronto, 1969), pp. 24–5, 47–8;
NAW
, IV, pp. 47–55.

    
6.
  M.F. Keeler (ed.),
Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage 1585
–
1586
(Hakluyt Society, Second Series, 148, 1981), pp. 141–6, 150.

    
7.
  Ibid., pp. 76–108; Wright (ed.),
Further English Voyages
, p. 134.

    
8.
  Keeler (ed.),
Drake’s West Indian Voyage
, p. 197. Drake expected a ransom of 500,000 ducats, Corbett (ed.),
Spanish War
, p. 71.

    
9.
  
Monson’s Tracts
, I, p. 130.

  
10.
  Keeler (ed.),
Drake’s West Indian Voyage
, pp. 200–2;
NAW
, V, pp. 39–52. A ransom of 1 million ducats was expected, Corbett (ed.),
Spanish War
, p. 71.

  
11.
  Quinn (ed.),
Roanoke Voyages
, I, pp. 480–8; II, pp. 497–8, 555–6, 580–98; Keeler (ed.),
Drake’s West Indian Voyage
, p. 171.

  
12.
  Wright (ed.),
Further English Voyages
, pp. 179, 213, 217–8;
CSPF 1586
–
88,
pp. 1, 42, 341.

  
13.
  Wright (ed.),
Further English Voyages
, p. 122; Keeler (ed.),
Drake’s West Indian Voyage
, pp. 275–6.

  
14.
  Corbett (ed.),
Spanish War
, p. xv.

  
15.
  Keeler (ed.),
Drake’s West Indian Voyage
, p. 212. The voyage was widely reported,
CSPF 1586
–
88
, pp. 1, 42.