There was one other factor, more geographical than philosophical. In the fifteenth century Spain was poised, this time quite literally, between the two seas that, at this remove, can be seen to have shifted suddenly in their relationship and their relative importance. To the east was the Mediterranean—which was now blockaded at each end by Muslims, the Moors at one, and the Turks at the other. To the west was the Atlantic—a body of water that was largely free of the predatory and hostile Islamists, and into which Spanish vessels could sail unchallenged and unmolested. So the Spaniards must have seen the Atlantic as a means of furthering Spain’s imperial ambitions and as a way of forgoing and forgetting the now suddenly uncongenial Mediterranean.
Portuguese explorers had already blazed a trail to Asia, had found the spices, ivory, gold, and other delights of the Indies and Japan and Java and Sumatra. But ever since the fall of the previously Christian stronghold of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the land trade routes between the Christian West and these rich and exotic and possibly Christian (and certainly not Muslim) countries in the East had become severely frustrated by the Ottomans in between. If only Asia could be approached from the other direction, then the Turks and their allies blocking the passes between the Bosporus and the Khyber could be circumvented.
The geographers of the time thought it was an easy enough thing to do. They believed that the distance from Spain to Asia, going westbound by sea, was quite minimal. According to the calculations of their cartographers, Japan was a little more than three thousand miles west of the Canary Islands, and the Chinese coast stood just about where Oregon lies today. So if the sea that lay off the west coast of Spain could be easily crossed, and if Christian ships could navigate with ease all the way to Japan and China and then perhaps beyond to India, and if these friendly and much-prized states could all be reached, in essence, from the other side, then the commercial and political benefits were obvious. Just a few months after the expulsion of the Moors, Columbus’s fleet was officially contracted to proceed west out of Spain to head for Japan and the Spice Islands of the Indies. But in the late autumn of 1492, the island of Hispaniola was found to be placed inconveniently in his way. “My intention in this navigation,” Columbus wrote later to the Spanish throne, “was to reach Cathay and the extreme east of Asia, not expecting to find such an obstacle of new land as I found.” Hence his later voyages around the Caribbean, and hence the eventual discovery by others—Vespucci, most famously—of the actual American continent that lay there unsuspected, and that the body of water between America and Europe was not simply an easily crossable minor sea but was in fact, and as we have seen, a brand-new ocean, the Atlantic.
This newly defined Atlantic Ocean was soon to become the main roadway along which the Spanish warships would journey to mount their attacks along on the newfound continent’s margins; it was to be the main supply route for their subsequent conquest of the continent itself; and it was to be the sole highway home for all the plunder and treasure that poured without cease from the vaults and the mines of the Spanish Main.
All of this, the beginnings of what might be called the new American enterprise, coincided with the dawn of the Age of Discovery. This was to be a worldwide phenomenon, beginning in the fifteenth century and lasting for the following four hundred years, and involving European explorers and merchants who fanned out across the world in search of treasure, trade, and knowledge. And with these two burgeoning trends, the old world of the Mediterranean—“that little inland sea where there had been so much scuffling and struggling among European peoples for centuries,” as the historian Fernand Braudel described it—suddenly and precipitously collapsed. The New World, washed by this huge new ocean, began dramatically to flourish, as it continues to do today. This was the true beginning of the Atlantic’s primacy; it was a hinge point in world history and was accompanied by the traditional handmaidens of commerce, plunder, and war.
Spain’s much-feared conquistadors were to be the first engineers of the many transatlantic colonizing missions that then followed. The template for their ruthless behavior was first struck in 1502, when a pious Castilian soldier-administrator named Nicolas de Ovando was appointed Governor and Captain-General of the Indies, Islands and Firm-Land of the Ocean Sea, as his orders had it, and brought 2,500 colonists, in thirty ships, to settle the island of Hispaniola. Over the next seven years he suppressed the locals with a massive display of force and violence, supposedly in the process reducing the native population drastically, from half a million to some sixty thousand. He imported scores of Spanish-speaking slaves and used them and such willing remaining locals as he could find to build the rudiments of the first cities. He planted sugarcanes he had imported from the Canaries, he opened gold and copper mines in the hills, he ordered large galleons to speed the crops and the metals back to Spain, and then he sent legates to other West Indian islands nearby to spread the benefits of Castilian rule as widely and as quickly as possible.
The one person Ovando was unable to bring with him on that first voyage was a relation of his wife, a minor noble from the southwestern Spanish town of Medellín, Hernán Cortés. The excuse, perhaps apocryphal, was that on the evening before the ship’s departure, the then eighteen-year-old had injured himself escaping from the bedroom of a local married woman—the kind of story Cortés, who would go on to become the archetype of the swaggering, bombastic, and savage conquistador, would very much welcome. Cortés did eventually reach the West Indies, and like so many of his kind—daring warlord-adventurers with private means and good connections to the Spanish court—he used the islands as a springboard to reach the American mainland. Once ashore, he began his famously ruthless campaign of suppression and cruelty that resulted in the defeat of the Aztec Empire and the establishment of a permanent Spanish viceroy in the capital of New Spain, Mexico City.
Like all the solemn, full-bearded, and greedily determined conquistadors, Cortés came by ship, with thousands of Spanish fighting men, with limitless armories of sophisticated European cannonry and well-tempered steel swords, and, most crucially, with horses and specially trained and armor-clad war-dogs. He employed all of these assets against the bewildered Aztecs, without hesitation—although the extent of his cruelties is said by many of his defenders, and by the defenders of Spanish colonial policy generally, to have been widely exaggerated. But by the end of 1520, after a siege-and-destroy march from the coast and the clever forging of alliances among the other native peoples—which notionally was said to spread both the rule of Spain and the benevolent balms of Christianity—the Aztec lake-capital of Tenochtitlán had been utterly destroyed by Cortés and his armies. By the beginning of 1521, the Aztec Empire, which in some senses had been as sophisticated and advanced as any of the European civilizations, had been entirely destroyed.
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The tragedy of the Aztecs and of their melancholy leader Moctezuma (who was taken hostage by Cortés and died mysteriously soon afterward—some say at his own people’s hands, others by Cortés pouring molten gold down his throat) was a story that would happen again and again—to the Mayas, to the Incas, to the various Native American tribes in North America—until the Viceroyalty of New Spain became a vast imperial possession reaching from the fogs of Northern California to the fogs of Lima, and from Panama and Darien to the city of Santa Fe and the peninsula of Florida. Great tracts of the western coast of the Atlantic were under Castilian rule by the close of the sixteenth century, thanks in large measure to the organized dispatch of so many superfast westbound ships and the hosts of well-armed soldiers aboard them.
In due course the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the English would sail their colonizing ships across the Atlantic, too, and though with generally rather more moderate displays of violence, would subdue the indigenous peoples they encountered and establish settlements themselves. The stories of these coastal colonies, the creation and extinction of some, the remarkable survival of others, have long passed into the legend of Ame
rica’s making: the stories of Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, of John Smith and Pocahontas, of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, and of Peter Stuyvesant, are all familiar—and in almost all of them, the role of the sea is paramount. But their sea was not a sea of pity: it was a barrier to be bridged, a source of wealth to be plundered, and eventually a passageway for the New World goods—tobacco, lumber, rice, indigo, furs, gold—that could be sent back home to Europe.
As the sixteenth century became the seventeenth, and as the settlements in the Americas started to coalesce into permanence, two new seaborne phenomena began to develop, a direct result of the swift European colonization of America. And then, coincident with these two, and to a degree also a consequence of each, there came a vastly important third. And pity was a common component of them all.
First of all, a new generation of pirates began to operate in Atlantic waters, which suddenly were being increasingly traveled by treasure-laden vessels, heavy with New World bounty. The sea, especially in the close waters of the West Indies, became a maelstrom of unpredictable violence, with the masters of eastbound galleons nervously on watch for the sudden appearance of black-flagged attackers, with consequences quite likely to be as lethal as they were surely financially ruinous.
Secondly, slaves were being brought across the sea and put to work for those settlers who ran the large plantation estates of the American South: the seventeenth-century Atlantic became the superhighway of the so-called Middle Passage, the triangular journey that took vessels from England—largely—down south to West Africa, where they were laden with forcibly taken Africans, who were then transported in the most atrocious conditions to the slave ports of the Americas, after which the ships were swabbed down and laden with trade goods to be taken—provided there were no pirate attacks—back to the home ports of England.
The third development, and to a degree a consequence of both of these, was entirely military. It came about in part because the crushing of piracy and the abolition of slavery both eventually became matters of state policy in the European countries that had first nurtured them. One might see this as ironic—and yet it was no more than a result of the Enlightenment, for as times and mores became increasingly enlightened, both activities were seen as they are today: as wicked and nakedly criminal. The change in heart, especially in London, brought about an increase in harsh oceanic activity designed to bring this criminality to an end. During this period, navies, the seaborne state forces that were used to root out the pirates and chase away the slavers, became steadily better organized and equipped and tactically more sophisticated.
But these naval forces were not employed simply to put down maritime misbehavior. At the same time as these new sailing fighting ships were being designed, built, deployed, and improved, and as techniques of admiralty were being honed, so there developed a slew of disagreements between various of the oceanic states themselves. Conflicts arose between England and Spain, for example, or France and Holland, or England and France—all countries that now had well-developed navies. As a result, an entirely new kind of fighting was born. The naval forces that had been created could now fight one another, at sea.
To be sure, boats had fought one another before. But the battling boats in the early Mediterranean—propelled by oars in the early days—employed techniques of ramming or forcible boarding, with one vessel attempting to sink or overwhelm another. In this new sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world, in this world where pirates had to be sent packing and slavers dissuaded from their calling, there existed a new generation of sailing craft that were swift and nimble, and, most crucially, were mounted with powerful metal guns. This led to a whole new school of naval warfare—the birth of the naval engagement, in which one of these ships, or in time a whole fleet of them, might mount attacks upon another, with guns and fireballs and chain-shot, all of the battling conducted at sea, until the fight was concluded by capture, by rout, or by wreck.
Piracy, slavery, and sea battles: all three phenomena connected in a frenzy of military activity. The first two became inadvertent godfathers to the third: and the great later naval battles—Trafalgar, Jutland, the Battle of the Atlantic, even to a degree the very much earlier British defeat of Spanish Armada—owed much in their conduct and their tactics to lessons learned in the fight to cleanse the seas of pirate and Middle Passage villains.
4. THE SCAVENGERS OF THE SEA
Pirates—those who, as the law has it, take a ship on the high seas from the possession or control of those lawfully entitled to it—have created havoc in the world’s seas for as long as mankind has been sailing in them. Long enough to have passed firmly into folklore: the Jolly Roger, the eye patch, the parrot perched on the shoulder, the disfiguring scar, or perhaps a wooden leg, or a hook for a hand—and cruelly appropriate punishments like walking the plank—all these ingredients have created a fictional confection of pirates as somewhat capital fellows with a liking for bellying up to the bar. Only when one knows that a far more common piratical punishment was to gouge open a living captive’s stomach, drag out his entrails, and nail them to the ship’s mast, then force him to dance backward along the deck, running his guts out like a clothesline—does the romance begin to fade.
To be attacked by a pirate ship was a terrifying experience. The scenario had a certain routine to it: under the steady press of the westerlies the cargo vessel, laden with treasure or trade goods, would be lumbering heavily east through steady seas of warm aquamarine, minding her own business—when suddenly a suite of sails would appear on the horizon, and a small sloop would sweep swiftly into sight. At a distance it might be flying the flag of a friendly nation; when within sight or hailing distance, it would unfurl the plain black flag, or one adorned with skull and crossed bones (or cutlasses), that was the widely recognized pirate flag. The sloop would then would come alongside, its crewmen firing warning shots across the bows or into the sails and so ripping them to shreds, and would then tack wildly so that its own sails would begin to flap madly from the mast. The victim, slowed by its loss of sail power, would then be forced to lower her own ruined canvas and come to a dead stop. Grappling hooks would then be thrown, hawsers drawn taut, and as soon as bulwark smashed against bulwark, scores of heavily armed, wild-eyed young men would swarm over the rails.
The reality of seventeenth-century Atlantic piracy was often colored by the fanciful imaginings of artists, such as the creator of this nineteenth-century wood engraving. Most pirates were cruel beyond belief, took little pity on their victims, and enjoyed boisterous celebrations at sea.
They would be brandishing cutlasses and sabers and light axes that they would slash at anyone showing the slightest resistance or disapproval. Some of the pirates would round up the crew, begin interrogating them, beating them, stabbing, all too often eviscerating or strangling them—in one famous case nailing a sailor’s feet to the deck, whipping him with rattan canes, and then slicing his limbs off before throwing his carcass to the sharks. Others would rummage through the ship’s holds and through the cabins, searching for anything of value or of interest. There might be gold aboard; there would certainly be guns and powder; and maybe skilled crewmen who could be forced or persuaded to join the pirate ship. And then, perhaps mounting a final violent assault on the passengers by way of Parthian shot, they would all swarm back onto their own ship, detach the ropes, and slip rapidly away, soon passing over the horizon and leaving whoever remained of the crew and the surviving passengers to limp away for refuge and repairs.
The golden age for the pirates of the Atlantic—a term that in this context includes both the buccaneers of the Caribbean and the privateers, the fleets of state-sponsored brigands who attacked enemy ships on behalf of nations whose own ships were too busy elsewhere—lasted for no more than seventy-five years, from about 1650 to 1725. Thanks to writers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe, the exploits of the most notorious found their way into the popular prints: men like Blackbeard—or Edward Teach—who conducted his busi
ness in the shallow waters off the Carolinas; or Captain Kidd and Calico Jack of the West Indies; or Bartholomew Roberts, Black Bart, whose beat was off West Africa; or Edward Morgan, who was pardoned of his early buccaneering and, as British privateering naval tactician of legendary skill and prescience, went on to be appointed a governor of Jamaica—all became celebrated, familiar figures. Writers had a heyday, too, with the small number of female pirates, most infamously Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who dressed as men and by chance encountered one another while serving on the same pirate ship—learning to their mutual dismay that each, of heterosexual inclination, was a woman.
Mary Read and Anne Bonny escaped capital punishment by declaring they were pregnant. Men had no such luxury: and as the naval patrols in the Atlantic and in the West Indies swept up more and more of their like, and as the world began to weary of their exploits, and as the scourge of piracy began to wear itself out, more and more men were brought home to England, many to suffer an especially appropriate execution.
Arrested pirates were tried in London in the Admiralty courts; and if found guilty, as most were, they were hanged on a special gibbet set up in the Thames at Wapping, on the muddy foreshore between the low- and high-tide marks. Captain Kidd was hanged in 1701 at this point, the so-called Execution Dock; the sentence handed down to him read, as was the custom, that his body must be left in the noose until three tides had passed over it and “you are dead, dead, dead.” Afterward the body was taken down, covered in tar to deflect the attention of seabirds, and hanged in chains at the mouth of the Thames at Tilbury. It was an advertisement, a warning to other mariners of the terrible sanctions that would be mounted against anyone planning to sail on a vessel that might unfurl the Jolly Roger.