by Frank Sherry
Over the years Fletcher had cultivated many privateer captains, encouraging them to utilize New York as their home port, and making sure they understood that—as long as he was the king’s governor and they made the proper “gift” to him—they might flout with impunity the Navigation Acts he had sworn to uphold.
From such business contacts Fletcher had developed genuine friendships with a number of tough privateers. He had discovered that he liked their company and their gruff, straightforward ways—even though he was much criticized by ordinary citizens for his bribe taking and for his shameless association with men who lived by circumventing the law, Fletcher continued to consort openly with these adventurers and their backers.
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The governor, therefore, did not hesitate to invite Captain Tew and his family to the gubernatorial home after the Amity’s return. In fact, he entertained the captain royally, and the Tews reportedly enjoyed their visit immensely. Mrs. Tew and her daughters cut imperial figures in their glittering jewels and dresses of Oriental silk, all bounty from the captain’s venture in the East—as the Tew ladies happily acknowledged.
The captain also relished his new prominence. He was seen on several occasions during his New York visit driving with Fletcher in the governor’s coach, smiling and nodding to all who greeted him. (When told that such coach rides with a privateer captain were unseemly, Governor Fletcher replied, with the cynicism of the true politician, that he was merely attempting “to cure Captain Tew’s vile habit of cursing in public.”)
Tew’s tales of his voyage also provided many hours of entertainment for his host. Wrote Fletcher later of the jolly captain: “A very pleasant man; so that at some times when the labours of my day were over, it was divertisement as well as information to me, to hear him talk.”
As the Tews and the crew of the Amity enjoyed the afterglow of their success, other captains and crews—just as canny and tough as Tew and his men—reasoned that if Thomas Tew could make so successful a voyage to the East, so could they. Sparked by the stories told by Tew and his men, tales began to circulate of the fabulous wealth of the Muslims of India—wealth that resolute sailing men might, if they dared, appropriate for themselves at the point of a musket. Treasure, and with it adventure, lay beyond the Cape of Good Hope, where the infidels wallowed in gold.
Those who heard these tales knew that there had always been a few privateers operating in eastern waters, and that some of them had done well. But these eastern privateers had never excited many imitators before. Now, however, after Tew’s success, and with privateering all but dead on the Spanish Main, throngs of enterprising merchants and officials not only in colonial North America but also in most of the ports of the western world, began to ready plundering voyages to the East.
Hundreds of privateer seamen, unemployed since the cessation of hostilities with Spain, as well as runaway slaves, indentured servants, debtors, drunks, ne’er-do-wells, and romantics, sought berths on these eastbound armed ships. Most of them believed that the infidel wealth would be theirs for the trying. Hadn’t each of Tew’s men earned £1,200? This was an amount double and triple the income of the richest bankers and merchants of London. It was a sum equal to the annual incomes of England’s greatest lords. Suddenly it seemed that the wildest dreams were possible, if a man dared to challenge fortune.
Although the celebrated preacher Cotton Mather thundered from his Boston pulpit that “the privateering stroke so easily degenerates into the Piratical,” no clerical admonition, nor any qualm of conscience, could stem the flood eastward. It was, after all, no sin for Christians to rob Muslims who denied Christ’s divinity.
And so, within weeks of Captain Tew’s triumphal return to Newport, seafarers from New York, Boston, Charleston, Bristol, London, and a dozen other port cities began to sail for the Indian Ocean, determined to equal Captain Tew’s great score.
Captain Tew himself was soon among them.
After only seven months ashore Captain Tew ordered Amity prepared for a new voyage. Perhaps the adulation of colonial society had begun to wear thin. Perhaps he yearned for action. Perhaps he had, as sailors often do, simply grown restless for the sea. But more than likely the merchants and brokers of his acquaintance had prevailed upon him to lead a second, larger, expedition to Indian waters.
In any case Tew purchased a privateer’s commission from his dear friend Governor Fletcher, paying £300 for the needed papers.
Then, in November 1694, Captain Thomas Tew and his veterans set sail in Amity for the Indian Ocean. This time they were accompanied by three other vessels, all under Tew’s command. Two of these other ships, however, returned to port because of storm damage.
When Amity and her remaining consort reached the Indian Ocean, Tew found that a flotilla of marauders had already arrived in the Gulf of Aden, and were searching for a Mogul convoy to attack. Clearly the word had already spread about the opportunities in the East.
Tew now decided to join forces with these other sea raiders, reckoning that there would be sufficient loot for all. Together the raiders patroled the waters of the gulf, looking for prey.
Then, on a hot September day in 1695, after weeks spent fruitlessly scouring the sea-lanes between India and the mouth of the Red Sea, Amity finally spotted a likely Mogul prize and struck off after her.
With all sails unfurled, Amity bore down on her prey, finally coming alongside and grappling with the Mogul vessel. But this ship, unlike Tew’s first victim, offered fierce resistance. As the crew of Amity was preparing to board the merchantman, the Indian soldiers aboard her discharged their muskets in a fusillade. Cannon aboard the Mogul ship also roared a salvo. When the clouds of smoke cleared a little, the Amity’s crew beheld Captain Thomas Tew staggering on his quarterdeck. His face was ashen. He was holding his guts with his hands to keep them from falling out of his shot-away belly.
Captain Tew fell to the quarterdeck. Within minutes he died in a puddle of his own blood. He spoke no word before dying. Amity broke off the engagement with the Mogul ship.
The disheartened men of Amity buried their captain at sea.3
But the news of Captain Tew’s bloody death did not deter the many other seafarers now intent on hunting the Great Mogul’s treasure ships.
In fact, even before Tew’s demise, fleets were already following his wake to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Many of those who sought the Mogul’s wealth insisted—like Captain Tew himself—on the fiction that they were privateers in service to Christianity. But many others now openly scorned the euphemism “privateer.” Most of these were ordinary seamen who had seized the ships of their masters in mutiny, and who had set out defiantly for the eastern seas “on their own account.”
By the mid-1690s, dozens of such ships—self-proclaimed pirates commanded by elected captains and manned by admitted outlaws—were plying the vast watery triangle between the Cape of Good Hope, the Red Sea, and the western coast of India in search of plunder.
The pirate war on the world had begun.
But even these early pirate captains and crews were only the vanguard of the brigand armadas still to come as—year by year—legions of rebellious sailors fled from a civilization they had come to hate, and declared themselves enemies of the world.
What was that world, that civilized society that the pirate outlaws detested and fought, really like?
It was, above all, a world of stunning contrasts.
2
A Brilliant Time, a Brutal Time
In the spring of 1697, twenty-five-year-old Czar Peter I of Russia—later to be called “The Great”—embarked on a bizarre mission.
The Russian autocrat, who had been on his throne for eight years at the time, set out to visit the chief cities of western Europe in order to absorb as much as he could of the culture of the age.
Although, with his six feet seven inches of height, and his trailing entourage of courtiers, aides, and guards, the imposing Russian czar was recognized everywhere h
e went, Peter, throughout his long journey, denied his true identity, insisting that he was merely a private citizen on a private excursion.
Descending like a whirlwind on the capital cities of the West, Peter visited factories, met with scientists, conversed with artisans, mechanics, and shipwrights, and even labored for a time in a Dutch shipyard—all to learn, firsthand, as much as he could of the new science and technology then emerging in Europe. The czar’s ultimate object was to import the new technology and learning to Russia so that, using the tools of western science and the skilled hands of western workers, he could remake his backward, conservative nation in the image of the “civilized” West.
After months of observing the achievements of European civilization, Peter was reportedly astonished by the advances that he had seen. Nor was Peter alone in his assessment. To most educated Europeans of the time, it seemed that humanity had entered upon a Golden Age when the mind of man, using the new tools of science, would at last prevail over Nature, if not over God.
It was the first true Age of Science, a time of splendid intellectual departures from a past in which religious dogma had forbidden inquiry beyond the “truths” already revealed in the teachings of the Church. As Bertrand Russell has written: “The modern world, so far as mental outlook is concerned, began in the seventeenth century.”
By the time that century had reached its last decade, scholars all over Europe, utilizing the new “scientific method” of discovering truth from an objective examination of reality, had developed the microscope, the telescope, the compass, the first reliable clocks, the calculus, and the barometer. Physicists were investigating the properties of gases, writing treatises on optics and the composition of the stars, and hazarding intelligent guesses about the basic nature of matter. Isaac Newton, by describing the laws of gravity, had already changed humankind’s view of the universe.
It was a scintillating age in the arts as well. Rembrandt and Rubens, Velásquez, Van Dyke, and Vermeer all produced their masterworks in this century. Every literate man and woman read Milton, the greatest poet of the time. Most also knew Dryden and Marvell. Montaigne’s wise essays, the fables of La Fontaine, and the cynical brilliance of La Rochefoucauld, delighted readers not only in France but wherever thoughtful men and women gathered. The immortal plays of Molière, Corneille, and Racine amused, disturbed, and outraged the court of the Sun King at Versailles, and won audiences all over the Continent and the world.
Master musicians like Corelli and Purcell were heard in the houses of the rich. Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, and Scarlatti would each begin creating his own glorious music within a few years.
If science and art sparkled as never before, so did social life—at least among the nobility.
In the ballrooms of the great houses, silk-clad ladies, rouged, powdered, and dazzling in jewels and the latest fashion, danced with bewigged gentlemen in embroidered waistcoats and silk stockings, while orchestras played the stately music of the day.
The salons of the wealthy also served as stages for masques, plays, musicales, and poetry recitals. But witty conversation and gossip were the favorite social pastimes in the houses of the rich, and gala evenings were usually accompanied by sumptuous repasts that often included champagne, tea, chocolate and coffee—luxurious beverages that first came into use at this time. Many evenings concluded with the smoking of a pipe or two of tobacco—another innovative luxury. Over the munificence of this new age shone the glittering light of wax candles, then newly invented, which lent an unheard-of luster to the pleasures of the night.
Perhaps the brilliance of the age was best personified by King Louis XIV of France, who gloried in his appellation “The Sun King,” a title conferred upon him both for the magnificence of his court and for the power he wielded as the ruler of a France that dominated Europe, and most of the civilized world.
Standing only five feet four inches tall, and with a face badly scarred by childhood smallpox, Louis was not impressive physically. But as a monarch, he was a colossus. As the last decade of the seventeenth century began to unroll, he had governed France for more than thirty years—and he had stamped his personality on the age.
Louis ruled France as an absolute monarch. The glorification of his reign, and of France, was his chief occupation. Toward that end he had imposed crushing taxes on his subjects in order to build his unmatched armies—so far undefeated—and to erect that splendid monument to himself and to la gloire: Versailles.
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Although as a matter of historical fact, Louis never uttered the haughty words attributed to him by a later imaginative historian—“L’etat, c’est moi”—the quote, nevertheless, expresses not only the absolutism with which the French monarch ruled his own nation but also the arrogance, born of power, with which he confronted the rest of the world.
France, under Louis, stood at the apex of her strength. She possessed the most formidable army in all the world, and an armed fleet that appeared to have no equal. She also controlled a vast empire in the New World, extending from Canada southward along the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico.
Louis—and France—appeared even more formidable because much of the rest of Europe seemed politically disorganized or militarily weak.
Catholic Spain still ruled vast territories in the New World, and her yearly treasure fleets still carried immense amounts of gold and silver from her overseas possessions to the coffers of His Most Catholic Majesty. But Spain had in fact lost her ability to control events in the world. The Spanish had depended too much on captured treasure, failing to understand that a nation’s true wealth lies in the production of goods and services, not in the possession of stolen gold. As treasure flowed to Spain, and from Spain into the rest of Europe, it degenerated in value, buying less and less until, inevitably, Spain’s economic and military power had begun to fade.
In the brilliant seventeenth century, religious differences usually determined political enmities as well. With occasional expedient exceptions, nations with a preponderance of Protestant population were generally in conflict with the Catholic powers.
In the 1690s, Holland, despite her small size, was the foremost of the Protestant powers. She was at the height of her commercial success, a center of the arts and sciences, and a refuge for the dispossessed victims of Catholic persecution (including the philosopher Spinoza). Amsterdam was one of the largest cities of Europe and the financial center of the world. In government, Holland was an oligarchic republic under the control of a limited number of men who represented the various commercial and political interests in the country. The executive leadership of the country was in the hands of a “stadtholder,” who led the armies and in general ran the nation with the consent of his councillors. In this era, Holland’s stadtholder was the gifted William of Orange, an implacable enemy of Louis XIV, who had spent his life fighting the Sun King and who was intent on forming a coalition of European states to put an end to the ambitions of Royal France.
Fragmented by religious strife, Germany was a collection of principalities, ecclesiastical states, and “free cities,” a geographic patchwork that was essentially the political debris from the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire.1
One Germanic state, however, wielded considerable political influence in Europe. This was Hapsburg Austria. Once the main component of the defunct Holy Roman Empire, Austria in this era found herself confronting the expansionist Turkish Empire which was pushing its way into Europe, even threatening Vienna itself.
In the north, Protestant Sweden, under a series of competent and successful kings, had turned the Baltic into a Swedish lake, dominating the northern fringe of Europe from Denmark to Poland and into the so-called Baltic States. Within a few years, however, Sweden would find herself challenged by the Russia of Peter the Great.
Far to the south, in the Mediterranean, the petty states of Italy continued to squabble and intrigue among themselves, as they had since before the Renaissance.
The Turkish O
ttoman Empire, conqueror of Constantinople, dominated the eastern Mediterranean and virtually all the Middle East.
None of these states, however, could compare with the France of Louis XIV in wealth or military strength.
Yet, as the 1690s dawned, the Sun King found himself confronting what would be the most perilous challenge of his long reign. It came from a rising new power: England.
No longer the feisty little island kingdom of Elizabeth, England had begun to achieve considerable place in the European order. But she had arrived at her new eminence only after enduring a turbulent century of religious strife, bloody revolution, political repression, and painful economic and military growth.
When Elizabeth had died in 1603, the Tudor dynasty had died with her. Elizabeth was succeeded by the Stuarts, who believed implicitly in the Divine Right of Kings and who ignited civil war in England over the issue. After Charles I—the second Stuart to occupy the English throne—was beheaded on a January morning in 1649, England was ruled by the harsh hand of Oliver Crom well, the Puritan Lord Protector, who had begun his career as a parliamentary firebrand.
Under Cromwell the Parliamentary forces crushed the Royalist cavaliers, suppressed an Irish insurrection with great cruelty, and won great victories at sea.
When Cromwell died in 1658, a reaction against his hard reign set in.
The Stuart dynasty was restored in 1660. The pleasure-loving Charles II, a professed if lighthearted Protestant, was given the throne of his forebears. Religious tensions, however, remained acute because of the continuing divisions between Catholics and Protestants, and between the Anglican Church and the Puritans and other dissenters.