ABSTRACT
I ndividuals properly described as buccaneers continued to be active in the Caribbean in the years following the South Sea raids, but for the most part this type of free-association piracy was in decline. Concerted efforts
to root out the multinational sea-robbers, as has been seen, began in earnest in the 1680s, but a series of international wars intervened, stalling the eradication plans of England, France, and Spain. This chapter treats the last significant buccaneer episodes in the Caribbean before turning to the rise of a group of pirates known commonly as "freebooters." These were the last pirates of the early modem Americas, and some of them were in fact simply veteran seventeenth-century buccaneers in eighteenth-century disguise. What most distinguished the freebooters from their predecessors, however, was their almost universal rejection of national and religious authorities, their predominantly lower-class maritime origins, and their overwhelmingly Anglo-American heritage. Among the most notable of these outlaws were William Kidd, Henry Avery, Edward Teach, Bartholomew Roberts, and two of history's few known female pirates, Ann Bonny and Mary Read. The last pirate cycle, which occurred in the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), would witness more raids than ever before on English, French, Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, and even Mughal Indian trading vessels. The Spanish were not exempted from these depredations, but their problems
with the Anglo-American freebooters tended to concentrate more around shipwrecked treasure vessels than buccaneer-style land raids. Indeed, the freebooters' principal enemies were their own former masters, not the Iberian "papists" of centuries past, and in what might be considered an historical irony, at least in the long view, it was primarily English property law rather than Spanish defensive resolve that finally wiped out the pirates.
