Piracy In The 18th Century

Since each court individually chose how to define piracy and determine who was a pirate, and lacking a ubiquitous and clear procedure to guide justices, predictably, the application of these determinants were haphazard and unpredictable. This extreme environment of uncertainty meant that neither sailors nor government officials knew for certain if these aggressive maritime actions were an illegal, or at the very least, a hangable offense. So why did the crown and Parliament allow such ambiguity to dominate a process perceived to be so vital to the security of the empire? After all, as we will see, some colonial officials manipulated the loopholes created by the various definitions and jurisdictions to continue to support piracy into the eighteenth century. The answer is that clarity has an inherent narrowing …show more content…
If convicting pirates in England was complicated, trying them in the American colonies prior to 1700 was downright befuddling. Technically, all of the piracy trials in colonies during the seventeenth century were of questionable legality since under the 1536 Henry VIII act, only a commissioned oyer and terminar court in England could hear cases of piracy. Contradictorily, the proprietary charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony gave jurisdiction to try crimes on land and sea to the General court, while Virginia, and Maryland heard maritime cases, including piracy, in local county courts beginning in the 1650s. The second half of the seventeenth century witnessed the creation of admiralty courts in several of the proprietary colonies, including Jamaica and Rhode Island. However, the existence of Admiralty courts did not grant authority to try pirates, and few such cases went before judges during this era. The majority of the courts business dealt with condemning