CHAPTER III
PIRACY IN THE EARLY TUDOR TIMES
The kind of man who devotes his life to robbery at sea
is not the species of humanity who readily subjects
himself to laws and ordinances. You may threaten
him with terrible punishments, but it is not by these means
that you will break his spirit. He is like the gipsy or the
vagrant: he has in him an overwhelming longing for
wandering and adventure. It is not so much the greed
for gain which prompts the pirate, any more than the land
tramp finds his long marches inspired by wealth. But
some impelling blind force is at work within, and so not all
the treaties and agreements, not all the menaces of death
could avail to keep these men from pursuing the occupation
which their fathers and grandfathers had for many years
been employed in.
Therefore piracy was quite as bad in the sixteenth century as it had been in the Middle Ages. The dwellers on either side of the English Channel were ever ready to pillage each other's ships and property. About the first and second decade of the sixteenth century the Scots rose to some importance in the art of sea-robbery, and some were promptly taken and executed. In vain did Henry VIII. write to Francis I. saying that complaints had been made by English merchants that their ships had been pirated by
