WAVES OF TERROR

Pirate raids once made our coasts fearful places. Sam Willis recalls the era when danger stalked our seas.

For centuries, pirate raids made Britain’s coast a place to be feared and avoided.

Sam Willis examines the era when danger stalked the seas and barbarous kidnappers seized locals from the shores

“And though we have not always war upon the sea yet it shall be necessary that the King have always some fleet upon the sea, for repressing of rovers, saving our merchandise, our fishers, and the dwellers upon the coasts…”

Sir John Fortescue (c.1395 – c.1477)

Here’s a fun task to transport you to a happy place: which words do you think best describe the British seaside? Mine are: pasties, surfing and lazy sunbathing. It’s a personal response and my list is almost entirely defined by the fact that I live in the West Country. But I bet that – wherever you are imagining yourself – the imagery and words that come to mind are generally positive.

Now what about these: fear, slavery, greed, torture. These are words that used to be linked with the coast. And the unsavoury list goes on and on: predators, corruption, cruelty, deceit, betrayal, murder. Do not be deceived when you sit in your deckchair safely watching the gulls circle overhead, for the British coast used to be a place of acute danger.

The fear associated with the coast was born from being an island nation. We have looked to the sea for millennia for sustenance and wealth, and as long as there has been trade at sea, there has been robbery at sea. The famous golden age of piracy is associated with Caribbean waters and names such as William Kidd and Blackbeard, but those men came from a much less well-known but crucially important world that was shaped by an ancient tradition of violent robbery at sea.

In the medieval period, piracy was widely practiced around our coasts. There was very little legal structure to define or condemn pirates and very few ships to police the coasts. The sea was a strange place where no man could claim any rights, no court had any jurisdiction, and no sovereign could impose peace. Piracy was not even recognised as a crime in English law until 1536.

VILLAINS OF THE HIGHEST ORDER

Pirates were protected, encouraged and supplied by some of the highest ranking individuals in the land. During the reign of the Tudor queen Elizabeth I, a Hamburg merchant was robbed by the ship Henry

Seckforde, “whereof is owner one Henry Seckforde esquire, one of the gentlemen of your Majesty’s Privy Chamber”. In the same period, personal ships belonging to Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral, actively engaged in piracy while they were supposed to be suppressing it.

Perhaps the most notorious English pirates were the Cornish Killigrew family. Sir John Killigrew was both captain of Pendennis Castle in Falmouth and head of a commission set up by the Elizabethan government to investigate and police piracy in the West Country, but he himself was one of the county’s most notorious pirates. And it ran in the family: his father was a pirate, his mother was famed for leading a boarding party in person, and in 1595 his son was accused of making his living by “oppressing his tenants… by robbery… by

“The sea was a place where no court had any jurisdiction and no sovereign could impose peace”