The devastation of Port Royal by an earthquake in 1692 further reduced the Caribbean’s attractions by destroying the pirates’ chief market for fenced plunder. The fall of Britain’s Stuart kings had restored the traditional enmity between Britain and France, thus ending the profitable collaboration between English Jamaica and French Tortuga.
Every’s capture of the Grand Mughal ship Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695 stands as one of the most profitable pirate raids ever perpetrated.Ī new phase of piracy began in the 1690s as English pirates began to look beyond the Caribbean for treasure. Henry Every is shown selling his loot in this engraving by Howard Pyle. These conditions brought Caribbean buccaneering to its zenith. In the 1660s, the new French governor of Tortuga, Bertrand d’Ogeron, similarly provided privateering commissions both to his own colonists and to English cutthroats from Port Royal. The early English governors of Jamaica freely granted letters of marque to Tortuga buccaneers and to their own countrymen, while the growth of Port Royal provided these raiders with a far more profitable and enjoyable place to sell their booty. The growth of buccaneering on Tortuga was augmented by the English capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655. According to Alexandre Exquemelin, a buccaneer and historian who remains a major source on this period, the Tortuga buccaneer Pierre Le Grand pioneered the settlers’ attacks on galleons making the return voyage to Spain. The buccaneers’ migration from Hispaniola’s mainland to the more defensible offshore island of Tortuga limited their resources and accelerated their piratical raids. This involved considerable seaborne trade, and a general economic improvement: there was money to be made-or stolen-and much of it traveled by ship.įrench buccaneers were established on northern Hispaniola as early as 1625, but lived at first mostly as hunters rather than robbers their transition to full-time piracy was gradual and motivated in part by Spanish efforts to wipe out both the buccaneers and the prey animals on which they depended.
The classic era of piracy in the Caribbean lasted from circa 1650 until the mid-1720s. By 1650, France, England and the United Provinces began to develop their colonial empires.