I thought the main advantage of being a privateer was that you had a safe port to go to where your actions wouldn’t be regarded as illegal. But there was no legal immunity anywhere else.
From the responses I take it that most countries did not recognize the practice of being a privateer and just called you a pirate. Only a few larger countries seem to be on the list as using privateers for war and giving them special status if I go by what was presented here.
Denmark used privateers in times of war, for instance against Sweden 1676-1677 and against UK in 1807-1814.
Funnily enough I read just the other day about a Swedish woman who took over her husband’s privateering business after he died.
Many countries used privateers; the real issue is how various countries treated other people’s privateers. The two don’t always correlate; as Chronos said upthread, there’s a tendency to view your own privateers as legitimate but other people’s privateers as pirates with a piece of paper.
To tell you the truth, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of systematic research on this issue. There’s a lot of work out there about why countries used privateers and why people became privateers, but relatively little about how captured privateers were treated. That’s why I say that generalization is difficult.
It would make a good subject for a PhD dissertation.
One would think that would be like the bailing-out-of-airplane rule: You don’t shoot my pilots swinging from a parachute, and I won’t shoot yours.
I think from the responses here, pretty much an country with a navy also had privateers. The only country not mentioned so far is Portugal.
And I just went and Googled and got a bunch of hits on “bucanero portugués”… while most of them appear to be about soccer, there seems to be at least one portuguese privateer on record.
It makes sense to me: after all, privateers were a naval version of militias - and like un-uniformed militia, they had the advantage that your Uniformed Gentlemen could call any which had been captured (i.e. failed) “rabble” and actually mean it.
does this include mercenaries fighting proxy wars for world powers during the cold war?
Don, is that you?
The Dread Pirate Robban?
I suspect ‘privateer’ covered a range of situations. At one extreme, the out and out thief/pirate in the pirate-infested Carribbean in the early 1600s who cut a deal (that might even have been upheld for a while) to leave British ships alone in return for not being hanged by the British if he was caught. I wouldn’t think it would end well for him if the Spanish caught him.
At the other extreme, something like the fictional Jack “Master and Commander” Aubrey’s Surprise, which was at one point a now-privately-owned but former Royal Navy vessel, commanded by a Royal Navy officer (on some kind of quasi leave) and run as a military ship with military discipline, while operating in the North Atlantic of 1812, where out and out piracy was hardly rampant. I would think had Aubrey been captured at that point, he’d have been treated as a Royal Navy officer.
Nitpick - when Jack Aubrey commanded the Surprise as a Letter of Marque, he had been (spoiled for those who might read the books)
dismissed from the Navy and struck from the Captains list. He had no legal connection to the RN whatsoever - in fact he was depressed to think that any wet-behind the ears lieutenant commanding a sloop could summon him aboard and demand his papers. Later he was reinstated, but then the Surprise became a hired vessel of the RN. At that point, he no longer needed a Letter of Marque, and wasn’t a privateer - it was a valid naval warship again.
I give you Ingela Gathenhielm.