Golden Age Of Piracy Essay

In 1860, Charles Eden and his companions travelled to the ruined city of Leon in Nicaragua, to scale the nearby volcano of El Viejo. From his account of this journey, within first edition of The Alpine Journal in 1864, was the earliest known mention of the phrase ‘golden age of piracy’ is used. The ‘golden age of piracy’ is a problematic term, both to define and to use in historiographical debate. Piracy on the one hand, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea.” While within the same dictionary, the term ‘golden age’ is defined to be “an idyllic, often imaginary past time.” A contrasting and contradictory pair to place together, yet this term was given to encompass the three outbreaks of piracy in the early modern world; the Buccaneering period, the

One way this essay will be able to quantify piracy will be by how many letters of marque were issued by the Admiralty. For example, the total number of British privateers operating around the territorial waters of England, Ireland and France between 1589 & 1591 was recorded at 236. This was during a time when the reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth I of England, advocated privateering and regulated it throughout the Anglo-Spanish War with ‘Letters of Reprisal’ (lettre de mark). She did this for several reasons, but one of them was to distance herself from any direct aggression towards hostile European powers. These letters were only obtainable by the Admiralty court, if the person in question could prove they had been robbed by a foreign power at sea. Nonetheless, it counts as an act of piracy and does show that the dates sourced in the title for Golden age of Piracy are too narrow, as this evidence shows piracy being advocated by the British as early as