Henry Mainwaring was an English pirate who began his career hunting other pirates. In 1610 the Lord High Admiral commissioned him to capture Peter Easton; that mission failed, and Mainwaring was instead given a privateering commission against Spanish shipping. He turned pirate with the ships under his command, operating from a base at La Mamora on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, which fell to a foreign assault on 1 August 1614. In June of that year his fleet of eight ships had raided the Newfoundland fishery, recruiting roughly 400 men and stripping supplies from English and French vessels at Harbour Grace before departing in September. Mainwaring accepted a royal pardon from King James I in 1616, reportedly on the grounds that he had committed no great wrong, and wrote a discourse on piracy for the King the same year. He was knighted in 1618, served as an MP for Dover from 1621, rose to vice admiral before leaving the navy in 1639, and later wrote The Seaman’s Dictionary (1644), an early reference work on nautical terms. He followed the exiled Prince Charles to Jersey in 1646 and died in 1653; sources differ on whether he died in France or after returning to England, where he was buried at St Giles’s Church, Camberwell.
Henry Mainwaring
