ABSTRACT

For many readers whose first language is English, the word "piracy" immediately brings to mind these verses from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, or, more likely perhaps, images from the Walt Disney film version of it. Stevenson's Long John Silver, Ben Gunn, Israel Hands, Captain Flint, and other colorful pirate characters in fact had analogues and even namesakes in the early modem past, but these characters, at least as we know them, were essentially products of a late-ni'neteenth-century literary imagination. For historians of the early modem world, and of early Spanish America in particular, a striking feature of many English-language pirate novels such as Treasure Island, and even some pirate histories, is the conspicuous absence of the Spanish and their colonial subjects, the pirates' principal victims in the Americas for more than two centuries. Pirates certainly fought amongst themselves, but "pieces of eight" and "Spanish doubloons" were usually taken from Spanish towns and Spanish ships. While the omission of the Spanish side of the story may be harmless at the level of fiction, it distorts history. As will be seen, piracy in the Americas took many forms during the long period between Columbus's landfall and the great pirate trials of the early eighteenth century-these will be explored in chronological order and in some detail. From the Spanish point of view, the

pirates, mostly men of French, English, and Dutch heritage who preferred to call themselves merchants, privateers, "gentlemen of fortune," and so on, were simply foreign criminals, and as such deserved no quarter. In the long run, defense against these interlopers would cost Spain's empire dearly.