In 1577, Queen Elizabeth I secretly put up 1,000 crowns of her own money toward a voyage she described in public as a trading expedition. The ship was the Pelican, the captain was Francis Drake, and the voyage became a three-year raid on Spanish shipping that circled the globe and infuriated King Philip II. No letter of marque for it survives, and most historians think none was ever issued. That gap, between what a government quietly wanted done and what it was willing to put its name to on paper, is the real subject of privateering.
What the Paper Actually Did
A letter of marque, properly issued, named a specific ship, its officers, and a time limit, and usually required the owners to post a bond against misconduct. In exchange, it authorized them to attack and seize enemy shipping in wartime, with captured prizes condemned through a prize court and the crown typically taking a cut, often around a tenth of the proceeds. The same act without a valid commission was piracy, a capital offense under English law going back to the sixteenth century. The line between privateer and pirate was not about what a ship did; it was about whether a piece of paper, properly issued, said the attack was legal this week.
Drake’s Legal Theater
Drake’s circumnavigation shows how thin that line could be made on purpose. Elizabeth’s backing was covert, with courtiers including Christopher Hatton and Francis Walsingham quietly investing alongside her while the voyage was announced as one of discovery. Drake seized the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción off the coast of Peru, along with raids on more than a dozen other ships and several coastal towns, all while England and Spain were nominally at peace. The plausible deniability was the point: if Spain complained, London could shrug.
Kidd’s Commission and Its Unraveling
By 1696, the arrangement had become more formal and more cynical. William III personally signed a commission for William Kidd that did two things at once: authorized privateering against French shipping, and specifically directed him to hunt pirates, Henry Every named among them. A group of investors, including the governor of New York and Massachusetts, the Earl of Bellomont, financed the voyage in exchange for a share of the proceeds kept outside the normal prize-court process. When Kidd took the Quedah Merchant in January 1698, the Nine Years’ War with France had already ended and the ship was sailing under a French pass, a technicality Kidd treated as license but that was later read as piracy. Bellomont, his own backer, had him arrested in 1699; Kidd was hanged in London in 1701.
Every’s Missing Paper
Henry Every’s crew never had even Kidd’s shaky cover. Their ship, the Charles II, sailed from England in 1693 under a license tied to a Spanish salvage contract, but the actual authorization never arrived from Madrid. In May 1694, with the ship’s legal status unresolved and wages unpaid, the crew mutinied, renamed her the Fancy, and spent the next year raiding without any commission at all. Their September 1695 capture of the Mughal ship Ganj-i-Sawai, one of the richest single prizes of the age, made Every the most wanted man in the English-speaking world and triggered a diplomatic crisis with the Mughal Empire that pushed England’s own East India Company to help hunt down his crew.
Woodes Rogers, Commission-Holder and Pirate-Hanger
Woodes Rogers worked both sides of the same system. He privateered out of Bristol in 1708 under a proper letter of marque, taking Spanish prizes in the Pacific and famously rescuing the castaway Alexander Selkirk along the way. A decade later, appointed governor of the Bahamas in 1718, he was the one administering George I’s royal pardon to pirates willing to give up the trade, and then hanging eight men in December of that same year who refused it. The same legal machinery that had once licensed him to raid now gave him the authority to execute men doing, without paper, what he had once done with it.
The System’s End
Privateering as a legal institution lasted far longer than the Golden Age pirates it helped create and hunt down. It was not formally abolished in Europe until the 1856 Declaration of Paris, signed by Britain, France, and most other major powers, though the United States declined to sign, holding out for broader protections for private property at sea. Even by the Spanish-American War in 1898, some governments still disputed whether the practice was fully dead. The paper that had once turned raiders into heroes, or hanged men into martyrs depending on who held it, took nearly two and a half centuries to finally expire.
Sources consulted: World History Encyclopedia; Wikipedia, cross-checked against primary-source-citing entries on Privateer, Henry Every, William Kidd, Woodes Rogers, and Francis Drake’s circumnavigation; the 1856 Declaration of Paris Respecting Maritime Law.
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