While doing some research for a kids’ book about the California Gold Rush, I learned that quite a few forty-niners took ships from the East Coast to the West. Some sailed down to the Isthmus of Panama to trek across the jungle to catch a boat on the other side. Others took the long route around South America to get to San Francisco.
Some of the articles I’ve been reading also point out the various dangers these people faced in their journey to the gold fields. One danger, however, that is missing is that of pirates. It would seem to me that pirates would still be a common danger to people in this situation. After all, French immigrants alone sent $80 million worth of gold back to France via ships between 1848 and 1855.
Were there, in fact, problems with pirates off the coasts of California? Or on the way through the Caribbean and around South America?
I’ve certainly never heard of any pirates for that time period. There are at least a couple of things things that would have made piracy a less than ideal occupation at that time.
The arrival of steamships - the first East Coast to West coast voyage was in 1848 on the USS California.
Where is a pirate going to live? By the mid nineteenth century, most of the nice places had already been taken. Your average pirate can’t just sail into (say) Havana and ask for a ship full of supplies in return for stolen treasure. Law and oreder had a fairly long reach, even back then.
True enough, but where do pirates live now? We still have a recurring pirate problem in places like SE Asia and around Africa. And that’s with modern ships!
My guess is the balance of technology. In the 19th century, it would have been difficult for a pirate ship to assemble a sufficiently superior ship to make piracy worthwhile. Hand weapons were more powerful-but readily available to the merchant ships. Larger caliber weapons (cannons) while I am sure available would be hard to acquire. Even if a pirate ship were to have such weapons, they would be hard to conceal when the ship returned to port. And remember, it was not in the pirates interest to sink the victim, just board it. So large guns might have been counter-productive. And ship design was improving rapidly, meaning that an older ship of the kind a pirate might start out with, would be out-classed by the newer merchant vessels. Today, we have a situation where offensive weapons and high speed boats are easy to acquire and are much more effective than the victims technology.
I have just read “If Pirate I Must Be” about the Dread Pirate Roberts. Pirates from his time did not have greatly superior weaponry. Mostly what they had was a willingness to fight, recklessness and a lack of concern for the legal consequences. Most merchant ships of their day had plenty of guns.
However, it’s rather like what you might do if you were surprised by a mugger with a knife: even if you have a knife yourself do you try to fight back and possibly get stabbed or do you hand over your wallet?
Merchant vessels often surrendered without a fight: they knew that if they did so they’d get robbed blind but survive. If they fought they might win or they might lose but either way they’d suffer potentially hellacious casualties and damage, thousands of miles from help or medicine. Merchants and their crew would rather be robbed, while the pirates were a bunch of reckless outlaws who barely cared if they lived or died.
No, I think **Ludovic ** and **Tapioca ** nail it: above all pirates need uncivilised areas to hide in, where there is lawlessness and where they are accepted. Where does a pirate operating off California hide? There’s no lawless archipelago just off the coast. And California itself had a reasonably effective system of law enforcement which would have strung pirates up if when they came ashore.
Actually, the biggest thing pirates need is not a place to hide, but a place to sell what they got. If the authorities keep an eye out for people who never actually trade any goods but always have some to sell…
All of these answers seem reasonable, but California at the beginning of the Gold Rush was a bit of a one-horse state. Actually, it wasn’t even a state yet. As the Gold Rush proved, California didn’t have the infrastructure to protect itself from even interior crimes like murder and robbery. The mortality rate at the time was phenomenal, and vigilantes ruled the day.
I was thinking that perhaps pirates couldn’t keep their sailors. Apparently, hundreds of ships were abandoned in the harbor of San Francisco as sailors gave up the seas to try their hand at panning for gold. After all, if pirates be all about buried treasure…
The Royal Navy was around in Dread Pirate Roberts’ heyday. So was the navy of a number of other nations. Their ability to project force into the relevant area (W.Coast Central Africa and the Carribean) was limited and consequently pirates were able to operate for some time, although they usually came to bad end sooner or later and usually sooner.
What was the Royal Navy’s ability to project force into the Eastern Pacific in 1850? I’m guessing “highly limited”.
The article also mentions the Royal Navy base Esquimalt (now a base of the Canadian Forces) right on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.
The Royal Navy was immense, with worldwide bases. (The sun does not set, etc.) In the 19th century, there is no place accessible to ships to which it could not project its force.
Mmm, those dates match up pretty nicely, too. Did British naval power in the region extend into the 1850s, though? The Royal Navy may indeed be the best answer for this question.
Sorry to sound like a stuck record, but there were many more than two naval ships after Dread Pirate Roberts in his day. Nonetheless he was able to operate successfully for a substantial period because he had plenty of little islands to attack and to hide out amongst.
Well, he’s just an example of a “successful” pirate who’s history is well known due to the capture and trial of many of his crew. We know what conditions he was able to operate in, and so he provides a good working comparison. He was an asshole of the highest order, in fact.
My wife has a Pirate blog. It doesn’t specifically answer the question, but is full of pirate trivia, including some pertinent info about where Pirates operate today.
The main places where pirates operate today are The Strait of Malacca and off the coast of Somalia. They operate in much similar fashion as land terrorists. The Somalian ‘Mothership’ system is interesting. They launch fast boats from larger ships.
Embarrassingly I’ve been calling him “Dread Pirate Roberts” when his name was actually Bartholomew Roberts (or “Black Bart”). Dread Pirate Roberts is a character from “The Princess Bride”, named after Roberts :smack:
Maybe it’s simply a matter of the pickings being so easy for land-based robbers, thieves, card sharps, and claim-jumpers that nobody wanted to risk going out on a boat to do their dirty work.
Look at it this way, in the back country you can come and go as you please; steal some gold and go get drunk right away; sleep it off as long as you like; and if your parters don’t like it, just leave.
On a ship, you’ve got to work all the time (or at least regularly). If you don’t pull your weight, you’ve got the rest of the crew to answer to, and nowhere to go if you don’t like it. What’s more, I’ve heard that a pirate’s life was pretty miserable on average, even in piracy’s heyday. Maybe some got into it for adventure, but I gather many pirates went to sea because they just couldn’t survive on land.
So maybe the decline of piracy was not just a matter of enforcement at sea. Maybe the pirates were simply seduced by new, safer, drier opportunities for evil-doing on land.
I just thought of another thing. If I recall correctly, ship owners during the gold rush could usually find plenty of legitimate work ferrying suckers…, er, passengers to California at outrageous rates. There was also a pretty strong market for sailors in the whaling industry. All this probably made piracy look like a bad economic choice even for committed seafarers.
I also wonder if there was a difference in the average treatment of Naval and merchant marine sailors between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that reduced the number of mutinies and other acts that might drive sailors into piracy, so to speak. Does anybody here know?
