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Protecting the Rights of Englishmen The Rise and Fall of Carolina’s Piratical State Mark G. Hanna During the late seventeenth century Charles Town was one of the most infamous pirate nests in the Atlantic World. The roots of Carolina’s piratical state can be traced back well before the colony’s foundation to Port Royal, Jamaica, during the decades following its acquisition by the English in 1655. Sea marauders of all nations fit out their vessels in its deep harbor and spent their hard-fought Spanish pieces of eight on liquor and prostitutes in its many taverns. Without a thriving sugar plantation economy built on slave labor like that in Barbados, early Jamaicans relied on the plunder of largely independent crews emphatically deemed “privateers” despite their obvious transgressions against international treaties of peace.1 By the mid-1670s a rapidly expanding slave population began to produce stable profits from sugar exports. Wealthy planters could no longer allow bloodthirsty pirates to destabilize international affairs, which might lead to a Spanish invasion or even a bloody slave revolt foreshadowing similar developments in the Carolina colony a few decades later. By the 1680s Jamaican authorities not only banned English pirates; they tried and executed scores of them and hung them in gibbets at the entrance of the port. Even Henry Morgan, a man once considered a pirate by the Spanish and a supporter of “privateering” as deputy governor during the 1670s, became one of the wealthiest planters on the island who, as vice admiral, personally hunted pirates by the 1680s. The closing of Port Royal certainly did not compel all former pirates to abandon a life before the mast to work as laborers on plantations. As fewer men owned more and more land in Jamaica, opportunities to join the landed gentry in the West Indies diminished. Some crews sailed to the Bay of Campeche to illegally cut logwood used for dyeing cloth. These roving bands periodically united with international armadas to raid along the Spanish Main. Their most infamous attack was the sack of the Spanish entrepôt port of Vera Cruz in 1683. Many of these men crossed over the Isthmus of Darien (today Panama) to prey on the Spanish in their most vulnerable ports on the southern Pacific coast known as the “South Sea.” Bent on maintaining peace with Spain, Jamaica ’s governor, Sir Thomas Lynch, passed what would be known as the 296 Mark G. Hanna Jamaica Act in 1684, forbidding trade with pirates and establishing procedures for the prosecution their of aiders and abettors on land. Carolina’s Lords Proprietors initiated their settlement amid this transformation of the English West Indies settling in its present location on Oyster Point in earnest in 1680. Hoping to begin plantations of their own on cheaper and more readily available land, colonists arrived with dreams of establishing a new Barbados, a successful commodity producing plantation economy based on slave labor. Instead Carolinians produced no staple crop during the first two decades and survived primarily on selling provisions in the West Indies or participating in the unscrupulous Indian trade.2 Many pirates of the West Indies soon learned that if they could not return to Port Royal they could follow the Gulf Stream north through the Florida Straights to Charles Town to refit and careen their vessels and purchase a wide variety of victuals. Charles Town was in a perfect position to gain the pirate market, close to the major sites of West Indian plunder but far enough away to escape those who might seek retribution . The treacherous coastline that separated Charles Town and Virginia also isolated the colony from the prying scrutiny of its northern neighbors and their Crown-appointed governors. However much they might have wanted to replicate Barbados, Carolinians instead established a community in Charles Town that resembled more closely the Port Royal of the 1670s in its willingness to welcome vessels that had quite clearly performed acts of piracy.3 Some pirates, like Captain Jacob Hall, were based primarily in Carolina.4 Other pirates, like the Frenchman Captain Grammont, simply anchored off the sand bar in Charles Town harbor letting Carolinians come to him while some even joined his crew.5 As Alex Moore notes in his essay in this volume, early Carolina shared more with its actually pirate-supporting political sister colony in the Bahamas than say Virginia to the north. The same proprietors controlled both colonies, and Carolina governors often settled political disputes that arose in the...

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