Flotsam, Jetsam, Royalties, and Buccaneers
9 JULY 1647
FLOTSAM, JETSAM, ROYALTIES, AND BUCCANEERS
The Eleutherian Adventurers included about a hundred English Puritan gentleman and their households who obtained in 1647 a land grant in the Bahamas from Oliver Cromwell’s Parliament. Each member contributed £100 and signed a document this day, the “Articles and Orders of the Eleutherians Adventurers,” which guaranteed each man equal treatment and the rights to religious freedom and individual dissent. With this, the Eleutherians (from the Greek eleutheros, “the free”) set off for the New World under Captain William Sayle. Like most colonies in that day their charter included provisions that established jurisdiction over shipwrecked goods that washed ashore, whether these goods were flotsam (goods adrift by the accidental demise of a ship), jetsam (goods intentionally cast overboard from foundering vessels), ligan (articles sunken and marked for future recovery) or derelicts (vessels abandoned by their crew). Such rights were often granted to far-flung colonies from which the Crown had difficulty collecting its legal share of salvaged goods, the “royalty.”
In these days Spain’s ships plied the waters of the Caribbean and its approaches (the Spanish Main), and Spanish King Philip IV regarded any new colony along the routes of her galleons with suspicion. The Spanish attacked the Eleutherians and burned their crops and villages. Some of the survivors fled to the island of Hispaniola, a sparsely populated island used by illicit pirates in the Caribbean for provisioning. The Eleutherians became as skilled as the locals in preserving and selling the meat of the island’s wild pigs and cattle after drying it in special huts called buccans. Ironically it was the Spanish demand for the highly-prized dried meat that encouraged the “buccaneers” to establish a base and storehouse on the deserted island of Tortuga (modern British Virgin Islands).
Supported by trade with the Spanish, yet at the same time oppressed by them, the buccaneers banded into “The Brethren of the Coast,” pledging Eleutherian ideals of honorable co-relations and shared rights to food and property. A code of conduct evolved for the rough-hewn hunters who foreswore marriage and occupied themselves, rather, with three passions: Hatred for the Spanish; lust for wealth; and love of adventure. The first two dominated under such leaders as Sir Henry Morgan, Pierre le Grand, and Francios l’Ollonois. A market for stolen Spanish goods developed in the American colonies, and in 1654 the English challenged Spanish dominance in the Caribbean–an effort that allied the buccaneers, Captured Jamaica became a base for buccaneers operating for subsequent years with Crown-sponsored English privateers.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 14 JUL 26
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Craton, Michael and Gail Saunders. Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, Vol 1, From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery, Athens, GA: Univ of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 74-91.
Eleuthera History Website. www.bahama-out-islands.com/eleuthera/history.htm, 23 August 2001.
Shepard, Birse. Lore of the Wreckers. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1961, pp. 37-46.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Despite poverty, strife, and persecution the Eleutherians survived in the Bahamas, the modern island of Eleuthra was the site of their original settlement and retains the name. Governor’s Bay and Preacher’s Cove were also named by the Eleutherians. The Adventurers’ charter is recognized by modern historians as a significant document in man’s quest toward individual freedom, though in practice the colony was less idealistic than the virtues to which it aspired.
The reluctance of early buccaneers to take wives may well have been related to the very real scarcity of womenfolk in the islands. Competition for the attentions of women might have been so otherwise intense as to interfere with the necessary activities of daily living.
Caribbean pirates became less discriminating with time, and in the early 19th century the US Navy undertook a series of operations to rid the area of pirates preying on American shipping. The “Death’s Head” flag bearing a human skull was often flown during a pirate attack in the early 1700s. (The Spanish had long positioned a human skull at the entrance to a graveyard). The Jolly Roger, bearing the addition of crossed long bones, was flown by such pirate captains as Edward England, Sam Bellamy, and John Taylor. It came into widespread use in the 1720s.
Philip IV was the grandson of King Philip II. Philip II was the regent for whom the Philippine Islands are named.