Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period Illustrative Documents

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Linda Cantoni, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. This
e-book was created from a 1970 reprint published by Augustus
M. Kelly, Publishers, New York.









[Transcriber's Notes: This book contains documents written in 17th- and
18th-Century English, Dutch, French, and other languages.
Inconsistencies of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and
hyphenation have been preserved as they appear in the original. (See
the last paragraph of the Preface for the editor's note on this.)
A few obvious printer errors in the editor's footnotes have been
corrected.

This book contains characters with macrons, which are represented here
in brackets with an equal sign, e.g., [=a].

The original contains various symbols to represent signature marks.
These have been described in brackets, e.g., JOHN [X] SMITH.

The original contains a number of blank spaces to represent missing
matter. These are represented here as a series of four hyphens.

In the original, there are a few numbers enclosed in square brackets.
They are here enclosed in curly brackets, in order to avoid confusion
with the square-bracketed footnote numbers used in this e-text.]




PRIVATEERING AND PIRACY

IN THE

COLONIAL PERIOD: ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS


EDITED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF THE
COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA


BY

JOHN FRANKLIN JAMESON

DIRECTOR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN
THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON


New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1923




TO THE HONORED MEMORY OF

JOHN JAMESON

OF BOSTON

1828-1905

VOYAGER, TEACHER, LAWYER, SCHOLAR

WHOSE LOVE OF LEARNING AND WHOSE UNSELFISH
DEVOTION MADE IT NATURAL AND POSSIBLE
THAT I SHOULD LEAD THE STUDENT'S LIFE




PREFACE


The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America have formed the
laudable habit of illustrating the colonial period of United States
history, in which they are especially interested, by published volumes
of original historical material, previously unprinted, and relating to
that period. Thus in the course of years they have made a large
addition to the number of documentary sources available to the student
of that period. First they published, in 1906, in two handsome
volumes, the _Correspondence of William Pitt, when Secretary of State,
with Colonial Governors and Military and Naval Commanders in America_,
edited by the late Miss Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, containing material
of great importance to the history of the colonies as a whole, and of
the management of the French and Indian War. Next, in 1911 and 1914,
they published the two volumes of Professor James C. Ballagh's
valuable edition of the _Letters of Richard Henry Lee_. Then, in 1912,
they brought out, again in two volumes, the _Correspondence of
Governor William Shirley_, edited by Dr. Charles H. Lincoln, and
illustrating the history of several colonies, particularly those of
New England, during the period of what in our colonial history is
called King George's War. More recently, in 1916, the Society
published an entertaining volume of hitherto unprinted _Travels in the
American Colonies_, edited by Dr. Newton D. Mereness.

It was resolved that the next volume after these should be devoted to
documents relating to maritime history. In proportion to its
importance, that aspect of our colonial history has in general
received too little attention. In time of peace the colonists, nearly
all of whom dwelt within a hundred miles of ocean or tidewater,
maintained constantly a maritime commerce that had a large importance
to their economic life and gave employment to no small part of their
population. In time of war, their naval problems and dangers and
achievements were hardly less important than those of land warfare,
but have been far less exploited, whether in narrative histories or in
volumes of documentary materials. Accordingly the Society's Committee
on Publication readily acceded to the suggestion that a volume should
be made up of documents illustrating the history of privateering and
piracy as these stand related to the life of America during the
colonial period--for it is agreed that few aspects of our maritime
history in that period have greater importance and interest than these
two. In some of our colonial wars, as later in those of the Revolution
and of 1812, American privateering assumed such proportions as to make
it, for brief periods, one of the leading American industries. We
cannot quite say the same concerning American piracy, and indeed it
might be thought disrespectful to our ancestors--or predecessors, for
pirates mostly died young and left few descendants--but at least it
will be conceded that piracy at times flourished in American waters,
that not a few of the pirates and of those on shore who received their
goods and otherwise aided them were Americans, that their activities
had an important influence on the development of American commerce,
and that documents relative to piracy make interesting reading.

It is a matter for regret and on the editor's part for apology, that
the book should have been so long in preparation.