Elizabethan Privateers and the Spanish Main

The privateers who sailed against Spain in the 1560s, 1570s, and 1580s were not empire-builders. Most of them wanted treasure, not settlements, and the queen who licensed them — Elizabeth Tudor — wanted deniability. Yet from this unpromising mixture of greed, royal opportunism, and improvised maritime violence came the first English claims to the Americas and the first English experience of waging war across an ocean. The Sea Dogs — Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh, Frobisher, and the rest — did not found the British Empire, but they wrote its first sentences in blood and bullion.

The Spanish Monopoly and the English Challenge

By 1560 Spain controlled an American empire stretching from the Caribbean to the Andes and the Philippines. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) had divided the non-European world between Castile and Portugal, and Spain was determined to treat English incursions into its hemisphere as piracy — a capital offence under Spanish law. Elizabeth, who needed English access to the bullion and tropical commodities of the New World and who had no interest in antagonising Philip II openly, found a way through the gap. She could encourage her sailors to attack Spanish shipping while denying any official connection.

The arrangement worked because both sides wanted it to. English investors wanted a share in the wealth of the Indies; English Protestants wanted to hurt the most powerful Catholic state in Europe; Elizabeth wanted the profits and the plausible deniability. As the Suma de la Geografía of 1519 already lamented, the English were “great corsairs” and would become greater.

Hawkins and the Origins of the English Slave Trade

John Hawkins (1532–1595) was a Plymouth merchant and seaman, son of a slave-trading father, who in 1562 financed the first English slaving expedition. He bought around 300 Africans on the Sierra Leone coast, transported them to Hispaniola, and sold them to Spanish planters, returning to England with a cargo of sugar, hides, and pearls that made his investors — including Elizabeth herself — a handsome profit. A second, larger voyage in 1564–1565 repeated the trick. A third voyage in 1567 ended in catastrophe at San Juan de Ulúa, the Mexican port that Hawkins had entered under a Spanish safe-conduct: the Spanish treacherously seized his ships in September 1568, killing several of his men and ruining him financially.

Hawkins did not invent the Atlantic slave trade — the Portuguese had been at it for two generations — but he made it a normal English commercial activity. The English slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the plantation economies of the Caribbean and the American South, were in a real sense downstream of his voyages.

Drake’s Circumnavigation and the Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard

Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596) is the privateer who became myth. In December 1577 he sailed from Plymouth with five ships and 164 men aboard the Pelican, renamed Golden Hind mid-voyage, intending to raid Spanish possessions on the Pacific coast of the Americas. He did far more: he captured the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción off the coast of Peru in March 1579 — a haul worth perhaps £600,000 in modern money — and, after a number of further Pacific escapades, completed the first English circumnavigation of the globe, returning to Plymouth in September 1580 with a cargo of silver and spices that made his fortune and the queen’s.

Elizabeth, who had secretly invested in the voyage, dined on board the Golden Hind at Deptford and knighting Drake with the famous if slightly disreputable detail of the ceremony being conducted with a sword whose hilt bore the inscription “sic semper tyrannis.” The 1587 raid on Cádiz, in which Drake destroyed around thirty Spanish ships in the harbour and crippled Spanish preparations for the Armada, became known in Spain as the “singeing of the King of Spain’s beard.” The English called it a more conventional act of war.

Drake’s death in January 1596, off the coast of Panama from dysentery, was characteristically theatrical: he asked to be dressed in his armour before he died, in case of surprise. The 1588 Armada, in which the English fleet played a central role in scattering Philip II’s invasion fleet, was the great public monument to his generation’s privateering — and the final proof that the English could challenge Spain at sea.

Raleigh and the Roanoke Disaster

Walter Raleigh (c. 1552–1618) was the courtier-privateer who took the English overseas vision most seriously. His 1584 letters patent from Elizabeth authorised him to “discover, search, find out, and view such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands” as he could reach, and in 1585 he sent a military colony of around 600 men to Roanoke Island, on the coast of present-day North Carolina. The colony was a failure — the settlers quarrelled, antagonised local Algonquian peoples, and returned to England in 1586 with the departing fleet of Sir Francis Drake.

A second, civilian attempt in 1587 — 117 men, women, and children, under John White — was worse. White returned to England for supplies but was delayed by the Armada crisis, and when he finally reached Roanoke in August 1590 he found the settlement abandoned, the houses taken down, and a single word carved into a wooden post: “CROATOAN.” No one has ever satisfactorily explained what happened to the “Lost Colony.” The likeliest answer, on the evidence of later Algonquian oral traditions, is gradual absorption into local communities — a fate less dramatic than the legends, but no less final.

Raleigh’s later attempts at settlement, in Guiana rather than Carolina, came to nothing. He was executed in the Tower of London in October 1618, after a jury in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot found him guilty of treason. His head was embalmed and kept by his wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton, in a red leather bag until her death twenty-nine years later.

The Buccaneers and the Caribbean

Privateering did not stop with Elizabeth. The buccaneers of the late seventeenth century — Henry Morgan, the Welshman; the English and French crews of the “Brethren of the Coast” — carried on the trade from bases in Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Tortuga. Morgan’s 1671 attack on Panama City, in which a mixed force of some 1,800 buccaneers overwhelmed the Spanish garrison and sacked the city, was the most spectacular raid of the era. It was also the last great one. The Treaty of Madrid (1670) by which Spain formally recognised English possessions in the Americas, and the gradual suppression of buccaneering by the English authorities, brought the heroic age to a close.

Morgan himself was knighted in 1674 and appointed lieutenant-governor of Jamaica. The buccaneers had demonstrated two things: the vulnerability of the Spanish Main, and the English capacity to operate at sea in the Caribbean. Both facts would matter when the Royal Navy fought its later wars in the West Indies.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of Elizabethan privateering has been animated, since the 1960s, by the question of whether to treat these men as pirates, proto-imperialists, or national heroes. The older patriotic tradition, going back to Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589) and consolidated in the nineteenth century, made Drake and Raleigh founding fathers of the British Empire. A revisionist current, represented by scholars like Kenneth Andrews in Trade, Plunder and Settlement (1984), has insisted that the privateers were essentially pirates whose economic effect on England was small and whose contribution to empire was incidental. The most recent work, by James McDermott and Harry Kelsey, has tended to recover the privateers as serious practitioners of early modern maritime warfare whose successes — and failures — were conditioned by the Elizabethan state’s reluctance to commit openly to an overseas empire. The empirical content of the debate has shifted, but the moral question — what to do with these bloody, ambitious, often cruel men — has not been resolved.

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