Pirates and privateers on the "maritime silk road"

With the piracy events involving American and Dutch sailors off the coast of Somalia making headlines, this would seem to be an opportune time to Pirate, Privateer, or Freebooter? at Poemas del rio Wang.  Some excerpts:

We consider first the blurred boundaries between piracy, privateering and freebooting:

“…piracy, privateering (and the latter’s legal offshoot, freebooting) represent from the vantage point of European legal definitions quite distinct activities. Piracy is committed by private persons who have banded together and removed themselves from society at large and thus also from the protection of the law. Pirates were deemed enemies of the people and of the state. Privateering, by contrast, is a concept closely associated with the idea of the just war… Privateers operated under a so-called letter of marque and reprisal (Dutch: kaperbrief, commissie van retorsie), but they were technically only supposed to be issued with a letter of marque if they actually had suffered damage earlier by the enemy. The letter of marque, thus, permitted the seizure of goods from the (declared) enemy as a form of war reparation. This logic limited prizetaking to vessels sailing under enemy flag (or the flags of enemy allies) and only during times of war… This was how privateering was designed to work from a theoretical, legal vantage point. Actual practice was naturally quite different, and privateering effectively grew into a practice the full-blown proportions of which could have not been foreseen or anticipated in the late sixteenth or even the early seventeenth century…

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries–European privateers were authorized to seize commercial vessels of the (declared) enemy under direct and explicit instructions of their government, ruler or home port. A freebooter (from the Dutch: vrijbuiter; German: Freibeuter), a closely related term, was someone who may have captured a vessel authorized by a letter of marque, in an act of self-defence or reprisal and under the laws of war, but subsequently sold the captured goods on the open market without awaiting the verdict of the local admiralty court, declaring the seized vessel “good prize” and without also ceding to the home authorities their due share of the booty, the so-called gerechtigheit van het land. Failure to await the verdict and surrender this share – customarily 20 percent – to the home Admiralty Board technically rendered the act of prize-taking “illegal”, or at least highly problematic, from the vantage point of the home government. In other words, failure to abide by what in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries grew into a myriad of procedures and regulations edged an act of privateering into the shadow of piracy...

With large prizes to be taken, it was not surprising that increasingly, letters of marque were issued after the event, irrespective of whether their captains had suffered damage, and with rapidly increasing trade, the problem was to escalate sharply in the latter part of the 17th century.

“…privateering practice led to the development of a particular type of sea robber, who, unlike the corsairs and merchant warriors of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was not committed to serve a single nation but operated on a ‘freelance’ basis for one sovereign after another, or for several at the same time… Unscrupulous sea robbers of this kind were so dangerous precisely because they always found the support of some nation or other, and were never the enemies of all nations at once.”

The post then goes on to detail the impressively dangerous passage noted at the red dot on the map (the Singapore and Malacca Straits), and the capture of the Santa Catarina in 1603.  The ship's cargo "became legendary" -

“1,200 bales of raw Chinese silk; chests filled with coloured damask, atlas (a type of polished silk), tafettas and silk; large amounts of gold thread or spun gold; cloth woven with gold thread; robes and bed canopies spun with gold; silk bedcovers and bedspreads; linen and cotton cloth, thirty last (approximately sixty tonnes) of porcelain comprising dishes ‘of every sort and kind’; substantial quantities of sugar, spices, gum, musk (also known as bisem); wooden beds and boxes, some of them beautifully ornate with gold; and a ‘thousand other things, that are produced in China’” (Borschberg).

Merchants from all over Europe attended the auction in Amsterdam. The sale realised 3.5 million Guilders, half the capital-base of the VOC. Yet extraordinary as this was, the cargo was not unusual. No wonder the Dutch were determined to press their case for unfettered access to the East.

There is a lot more information at Poemas del rio Wang.