Piracy: What is it?

In other words, what arrrr we doing here?

Ye Olde Page Contents

What exactly is "piracy"?

A basic definition

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization defines piracy from a modern international law standpoint thus:

Piracy is a maritime act of armed robbery, criminal violence or other depredation at sea [including kidnap, blockades/sieges, and ransom-taking] that is not associated with official governmental action. [...] The renowned English jurist Sir William Blackstone wrote that the crime of piracy or robbery and depredation upon the high seas was an offense against the universal laws of civilized society – what we refer to today as “international law” (Blackstone & Wendell 1850). Having renounced all the norms and mores of human progress and enlightened government, pirates were considered by the common law to have reverted to a “savage state of nature” – and their criminal enterprise was held to be tantamount to declaring war against mankind.[...]

The word “pirate” is derived from the Latin word pirate, which itself is derivative of transire, a transeundo mare, which signified a maritime knight or an admiral or commander at sea. Pirata means “to attempt” or “to attack.” [...] Like the word “Viking,” the word “piracy” denotes not just criminal marauding, but a way of life.

[...]

Importantly, for legal purposes, “piracy” occurs beyond the 12 nautical-mile territorial sea; the same illegal conduct occurring landward of the 12 nautical-mile mark – inside the territorial sea or the internal waters of a coastal state – constitutes “armed robbery at sea.” “Armed robbery at sea” is not an international crime, but may be a criminal offense to be punished under the laws of the coastal state.

Note the importance of whether these acts are sanctioned by any nation-state. When discussing definitions of piracy, it is crucial to note that some pirates were privateers, ie, they were actually commissioned by, pardoned by, and usually sharing thir plunder with, a sovereign state. This was, up until the 19th century, a major tactic in building the presence and stability of a nation on the international stage; Elizabeth I of England took her nation from a tiny island often on the defensive from other European states to a naval power to be reckoned with this way; and Alexander Hamilton, recognizing both the need for sovereignty in the newly-independent United States's merchant shipping lanes and the fact that we were broke and needed any income we could get our hands on, authorized any private American vessel to raid British merchant ships in US waters as privateers. Peter Lehr, in his book Pirates : a new history, from Vikings to Somali raiders, notes that there has always been "grey space" and quite a lot of overlap between piracy and privateering, which creates plausible deniability for the privateers, the states backing them, pirates claiming justification for their dubious acts, any attempts at bringing any of these parties to legal justice. This is a feature of the concept of privateering, not a bug, and is part of why privateering is no longer permitted by international law.

As covered on this website

Here, I'm talking about historical pirates--that is, pirates up until the 1850s, when [x thing Lehr talks about] happened--who traveled by sea. (At some point I might make a page for other famous criminals, and that would include highway robbers, but for now I'm focusing on sea pirates.) I'm excluding groups who made piracy a way of life for their whole culture--so I'm leaving out, for example, the Vikings--and focusing on individuals or those who operated in groups of loose affiliations based on chosen alliances. Their primary goal was theft of property, although this might have been part of a bigger goal--nationalistic terrorism, enriching someone else's coffers as a privateer, or a personal vendetta of some kind--and they often used violence to lend credence to their threats. Sometimes they also had other political or personal interests that might influence their targets or methods, but for the most part, stealing gold and goods was either the end goal itself or the means to it.

Modern usages

Illegal downloading of copyrighted material

To be clear, this usage was a calculated branding by corporate media in public campaigns to make their loss of money seem like a moral weakness on the part of heartless thieves who either didn't understand the dire ramifications of what they were doing or didn't care. In the early 2000s, people scoffed at how ridiculous the term sounded, and there was legitimate discourse in academia, journalism, and social commentary about labelling it this way, but we seem to have incorporated it into our common vernacular by now; by the late 2000s, people who had grown up downloading MP3 files on Kazaa or Limewire were throwing around phrases like "I don't want to give these people my money, I'll probably just pirate it and watch it for teh lulz" (aka, "for the lolz", "for the laughs"). There's a solid argument to be made for this framing contributing to the following generation believing that paying to consume a piece of media is a signifier that a given member of the audience endorses the ideas portrayed therein or supports the artists or creators involved in the making of the media...which presently has several harmful implications.

"Porch pirates"

Similarly, calling people who steal mail and packages off one's unattended doorstep "pirates" has been a marketing tactic, essentially to sell Amazon Ring door cameras. Yes, one company, by being clever about their marketing, can influence popular vernacular, and if you don't believe that,start from the cultural influence and work of "The Father of Public Relations", Edward Bernays, and the overlap between the advertising industries and political messaging, then recall the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit smear campaign or the gay wedding cake baker lawsuit.

Glossary

Hover your mouse over a word to see it's definition (it saves a lot of page space, honestly).

pirate
The basic terminology. Going back pretty much as far as there has been sea travel, and continuing today, a pirate is basically a highway robber of the high seas, someone who attacked merchant or other vessels to steal supplies and riches, and maybe take hostages. This was often done for personal gain, sometimes to get out of debt or make a fortune so one could then retire into a life of leisure with a new identity. Others were acting on principles or waging terrorism against governments or classes of people they disliked. Buccaneer is a synonym and mostly there's no difference between the two phrases, especially during the Golden Age of Piracy or discussions of it, but note the difference between these two terms and a privateer.

buccaneer
Also a football team in Tampa, or a dad joke about the cost of corn.

privateer
Similar to a mercenary, this was a pirate who was granted carte blanche (for the most part) by a government or established commercial interest to attack and plunder only certain ships, usually those of political or commercial rivals, and keep most of what they stole, minus a cut for the guarantor. This was actually a whole political strategy during times of war or the threat of it, and not only terrorized an enemy (including their civilians) or robbed them of capital, ships, and men, but was also an important means of enriching the guarantor. For more on privateering, note the page linked to from the "Piracy" page.

galleon
A huge Spanish ship that was sometimes used as a warship, but due to being so huge and ungainly, was mostly used as a cargo freighter. These slow-moving wooden vessels, when weighted down with goods, were obviously vulnerable targets for pirates, and so often travelled in fleets, escorted by smaller, more nimble warships such as sloops.

pieces of eight
A Spanish monetary unit of silver, equivalent to somewhat less than 1 US dollar in 2022. Like the American dollar is today, it was accepted in foreign lands and used as the standard by which other currencies were set, and remained legal tender (that is, accepted currency) in the US from colonial times until 1857. It was actually very influential on forms of currency around the world from the time of Columbus to today. This is an interesting page on it, and the Wikipedia page on it is also pretty cool.

sea-dog
Pirates probably didn't actually call people this all the time--"pirate-speak" is mostly an invention of 19th-century adventure novels propagated by 20th-century swashbuckling movies--but a sea-dog was actually what English-speaking sailors called sharks prior to contact with "the New World", possibly due to the similarity in appearance between a shark feeding frenzy and similar behavior by packs of dogs. The word "shark" is an Anglicization of xooc, an Aztec word that would have sounded similar to "shock" (that x makes a "sh" sound) and the Spaniards adopted the word while committing genocide and plundering their new finds as conquistadors, and the word would have circulated among sailors around the world during the age of European imperialist expansion in the following centuries. Calling someone "a scurvy sea-dog" is basically a child-safe way of a fictional bad guy insulting someone in a swashbuckling story; real pirates probably would have just cursed you out just like modern criminals do.

scurvy
This was a disease that was a real problem in sailors in times before a modern understanding of health and nutrition. Due to a severe deficit of vitamin C, people who developed scurvy suffered excruciating and disgusting deaths due to the connective tissues in their bodies disintegrating. Fingernails and teeth would fall out, long-healed old scars would open up, and broken bones healed in childhood would re-break along their old break lines. Then you died. It was gross. Some ship captains noticed a correlation between giving their sailors citrus to eat and a lack of scurvy among the crew, so in xxxx a doctor of the English navy literally prescribed that barrels of oranges, lemons, or limes be carried aboard their ships and that sailors be encouraged to eat them. Eventually, European science figured out what vitamins are and how they work, explaining why sailors who had access to fresh citrus were able to ward off scurvy. It was common for English sailors in port towns to be seen doing their work or exploring the town while sucking on a lime--just like how you used to pretend oranges were mouthguards when you were a kid--and since Liverpool has always been a port town, the English sailors that were a constant presence passing in and out were nicknamed "limeys", a term that eventually started to include locals of the area as well.

Galley Gallery, aka "What's that Ship?"

Something that drives me crazy about the books I'm reading is when they tell me what kind of ship someone's sailing and expect me, a 21st-century landlubber, to already know what it means. And what kind of boat someone used was important, as it signified not only where they were from (a Chinese junk was recognizable and was distinct from, for instance, a Dutch caravel) but how they could move in the water or make use of the wind...and therefore what purpose a ship served. A Spanish galleon was a massive floating fortress built for hauling goods--specifically, treasure--and therefore was a slow-moving, easy target and needed to be defended by other ships by moving with it in a fleet. Seeing a galleon on the horizon meant a pirate was about to make bank, as long as they could beat the defending ships surrounding it. On the other hand, a small sloop, a quicker vessel meant more for movement than hauling cargo, could just belong to a poor crew of fishermen, or it could have rich passengers aboard with pockets full of gold and trinkets, and maybe some interesting news to beat or threaten out of them, making moving in on a sloop less of a sure bet.

This section is a gallery of galleys, if you will (har har). Click a title or picture to find out what kind of boat might be sailed in different circumstances...so we can both can make sense of all the nautical gobbledegook!