29. Pirate or Privateer?
Sir Francis Drake’s eventful life finally came to an end in 1596. After a series of failed raids and attacks against Spanish America, he caught dysentery while anchored off Portobelo, in Panama, and died.
His career, with its turns from soldier and sailor to outright pirate, illustrates the era’s murky lines between outright piracy and legalized piracy, also known as privateering. In the years to come, the difference between a pirate liable for the hangman’s noose, and a privateer likely to receive official acclaim and adulation, was no more than a piece of paper. Those plundering the seas while wielding Letters of Marque were lionized, while those doing the same without such a fig of legality were condemned as pirates.
