What led people to become pirates?

For early modern Britons, piracy was rarely a career choice. Captain Henry Mainwaring was a pirate turned pirate-catcher, who in 1618 wrote Discourse of Pirates, a treatise on how to deal with the problem, for James VI and I. He believed that many sailors were driven to piracy due to hunger and lack of regular work. Certainly, the end of the Anglo-Spanish War in 1604 meant that many crews were discharged from service, and unemployment, deprivation and piracy subsequently soared. Mainwaring argued that the best solution to the problem would be if coastal towns provided regular work and pay for sailors.

Even at the other end of the social scale, turning pirate was often motivated by financial necessity. Take the case of aristocrat Sir Francis Verney. After failing to reclaim full control of his inheritance from his stepmother in a case heard by parliament in 1606, Verney was facing overwhelming debt.

He decided to seek a life of adventure as a mercenary in Morocco and pirate on the Barbary Coast. Verney also converted to Islam, which caused even more consternation among his family, since apostasy was seen as the final abdication of national identity.

Of course, what counted as ‘piracy’ and who counted as a ‘pirate’ were not straightforward issues, since the dividing line between illicit and state-sanctioned seaborne violence was not always clear. Francis Drake’s attacks on Spanish New World colonies and shipping on his circumnavigation of 1577–80 were piratical, since the two countries were not at war, and yet Elizabeth I knighted him on his return to England, and shared in the immense treasure.

The cases all unite, however, in their one key motivating factor: money.

Claire Jowitt, author of The Culture of Piracy, 1580–1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime (Routledge)