PIRATES, prostitutes and the poor have been a part of every society. Prostitutes and the poor have been consistent in their roles. Pirates, on the other hand, have always changed with the times. Recently, thanks to Hollywood and the Walt Disney Enterprises, there has been a cinematographic resurgence of pirate themes with varying eccentricities demonstrated by actors such as Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. Older generations were entertained by the late Errol Flynn whose connection to Port Antonio in particular and Jamaica in general is relatively well known.

One of the lesser-appreciated aspects of Caribbean history is the profound ways in which the Caribbean experience radically changed the modern world. Original contributions including the canoe, tobacco, as well as hundreds of food crops, and exotic new words revolutionised European, Asian and African cultures. Whatever came to the Caribbean became better. Caribbean sugar altered the dietic habits of the world. Hybrid Caribbean types represented an entirely new population group and European languages underwent tremendous modification based on the Caribbean experience. Rum, discovered in the Mediterranean during the thirteenth century, achieved a magnificent perfection in the Caribbean by the eighteenth century and remains the standard.

The same thing happened to piracy. Although as old a humanity, it is the Caribbean pirate that still symbolises everywhere the classic form of that activity. Yet piracy in the original sense represented a phase of Caribbean history that lasted from about 1560 to the late 1720s. Initially, pirates were stateless transfrontier communities like the maroons whose common bond was enmity to Spain. They thrived when Spanish hegemony in the New World seemed unassailable and rival European states needed a sort of non-governmental cover to plunder the riches of the Spanish Main. Piracy served that function conveniently, but not for very long. When Spanish power was manifestly diminished and other European states established successful rival colonies, piracy became inimical to the preferred goals of orthodox trade. European states then combined to eliminate it.

For the Caribbean, there are three
words that appear regularly and often indiscriminately as synonyms for pirates. They are buccaneers, corsairs, and privateers.

The term "buccaneer" is most popular in English and traces its origin to the Carib practice of barbecuing meat mainly on the island of Tortuga in the early seventeenth century. Most of the meat was derived from cattle caught locally or stolen from the nearby Spanish island of Hispaniola. This tradition continues in the popular Jamaican practice of jerking meat and fish. The French not only captured Tortuga but later acquired western Hispaniola, which they quickly developed during the eighteenth century as the richest colony in the world.

Corsairs was the description given to Christian and Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, and that word crops up frequently in Spanish and French for the Caribbean practice. The people that Europeans and Americans called Barbary pirates or corsairs engaged in activities comparable to Caribbean buccaneers - and so too did the third group, called privateers.

Technically, privateers operated under certain internationally accepted rules of conduct. They normally required some quasi-legal official letter of approval from the monarch or the Admiralty for specified missions. Ships captured by privateers were supposed to be brought for adjudication before a constituted Admiralty Court. Henry Morgan of Jamaica won a libel suit in the 1680s for a piddling amount of money from a publisher who described him as a pirate. Nevertheless, to the entire Spanish world Morgan was a major pirate.

Caribbean pirates fell into three categories. The first comprised the great majority of participants who lived and died anonymously but whose lives as self-described stateless persons gave reality of a lifestyle that still appeals to many today. Another group was caught, prosecuted and executed (or pardoned) largely because they failed to accept the distinctions that the emerging national states made between war and peace, or what properly constituted war booty. Captain Kidd, captured off Madagascar for attacking a ship of the British East India Company and hanged in 1701 along the Thames, was one such victim. Other unfortunates were Calico Jack Rackam, Mary Read and Anne Bonny who were spectacularly tried in Spanish Town in 1720. Rackam was hanged. Read and Bonny declared that they were pregnant and so were spared the gallows. Read died in prison and Bonny's fate remains obscure.

The third group of pirates managed to transform their lives and gain respectability. Francis Drake, commissioned as a privateer by Elizabeth I in 1572, circumnavigated the globe wreaking havoc on Spanish shipping in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. He returned to England in 1580 with £80 of gold, 20 tons of silver, 13 cases of silver coins, along with several cases of pearls and precious stones. His queen knighted him on board his ship. Morgan, William Damper and Woodes Rogers, all died in respectable comfort in their beds. Morgan was lieutenant governor of Jamaica. Dampier was convicted of piracy in the early 1680, but Charles II considered his nautical maps of the Pacific more important than his crimes and pardoned him. Rogers ended up as a governor of The Bahamas enthusiastically prosecuting pirates, including Rackam, Read and Bonny.

Pirates made a tremendous impact on the history, economics, politics and culture of the region. By destabilising Spain they facilitated the rise of the British, French and Dutch in the Caribbean. They improved shipbuilding, and they made rum a popular enough beverage to be adopted by the British navy as a daily ration. But the change from calculating wealth in bullion to estimating wealth by volume of trade doomed the activities of pirates. Moreover, the sugar and slave trades were less amenable to piratical depredations.
The age of piracy in the Caribbean represented a very important transition in the construction of all local societies.
Unfortunately, none of the important but complex contributions of piracy to history show up in the awful popular movies. But then commercial movies makers are hardly interested in contributing to good history. They would rather, like pirates, go for the cash.

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