Letter of marque
Based on Wikipedia: Letter of marque
Imagine a world where your government could hand you a piece of paper that made it legal to attack foreign ships, steal their cargo, and keep most of the profits. This wasn't fantasy. For over five hundred years, this was standard practice across Europe and the Americas. The document was called a letter of marque, and the men who carried them occupied a strange legal twilight zone—part patriot, part mercenary, part pirate.
The difference between a privateer and a pirate often came down to paperwork.
The Business of Licensed Plunder
A letter of marque and reprisal was essentially a government franchise for maritime violence. The issuing nation authorized a private ship captain—known as a privateer or corsair—to hunt down and capture vessels belonging to enemy nations. The privateer financed his own ship, recruited his own crew, and took all the risks. In return, he got to keep a substantial portion of whatever he captured.
This arrangement solved a practical problem that plagued every maritime nation. Building and maintaining a navy was extraordinarily expensive. Ships rotted. Sailors needed wages even when there was no war. Admirals demanded pensions. But with letters of marque, a government could conjure up a fighting fleet overnight, without spending a single coin from the treasury. When peace returned, the privateers simply went back to ordinary commerce. No standing navy to feed, no admirals to appease.
The captured ships and cargo—called "prizes"—had to be brought before an admiralty court for formal judgment. This wasn't a rubber stamp. The court examined whether the letter of marque was valid, whether the captured ship actually belonged to an enemy nation (trickier than it sounds, since flying false flags was common), and whether the privateer had followed the rules of engagement. Only after this legal process could the prize be auctioned off and the proceeds divided among the ship's owners and crew.
Without that court's blessing, the privateer couldn't legally transfer ownership. The original owners might reclaim their ship on its next voyage and sue for damages on the confiscated cargo.
What's in a Name?
The word "marque" traces back through Old English and Germanic roots to words meaning "boundary" or "border marker." The French version comes from Provençal, where it meant "to seize as a pledge." Both etymologies hint at the letter's original purpose: it was about crossing boundaries—national, legal, moral—and seizing compensation for wrongs.
The phrase "letters of marque and reprisal" first appeared in English law in 1354, during the reign of Edward III. At that time, the concept was closely tied to the idea of reprisal—private revenge sanctioned by the state. If a foreign power had wronged you, you could petition your sovereign for permission to take matters into your own hands. To apply, a shipowner had to submit to the Admiralty Court an estimate of his actual losses.
This notion that privateering was a form of "private war" sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it made sense in an age when the oceans were essentially lawless and every merchant vessel sailed armed for self-defense. The sea was a world unto itself, with its own brutal logic.
Over time, the distinction between letters of marque (originally for specific reprisals) and privateering commissions (for general warfare) blurred until they became effectively synonymous. By the time the United States Constitution was written, Article I simply granted Congress the power "to grant Letters of marque and reprisal" without mentioning privateering commissions separately.
The Ships Themselves
Interestingly, the terms "letter of marque" and "privateer" eventually came to describe different types of vessels, not just legal documents.
A "letter of marque" ship was typically a lumbering cargo carrier with square rigging—a merchant vessel that happened to carry the legal authority to snatch a prize if one wandered into its path during normal commercial voyages. These were opportunists, not hunters.
A "privateer," by contrast, was a purpose-built predator. These vessels were fore-and-aft rigged for speed and maneuverability, designed to chase down prey and escape pursuers. They were warships in everything but official status.
The East India Company understood this distinction perfectly. Their massive merchant ships—the famous East Indiamen—carried letters of marque not because they intended to hunt prizes, but as legal protection. These vessels were already armed with cannons to fend off actual pirates. The letter of marque meant that if an opportunity arose to capture an enemy vessel, they could take it without becoming pirates themselves.
When Commerce Turned to Combat
In July 1793, three East Indiamen—the Royal Charlotte, the Triton, and the Warley—demonstrated exactly how this worked. While supposedly on a routine voyage to China, they helped blockade the French port of Pondichéry. Then, sailing through the Straits of Malacca, they stumbled upon a French frigate surrounded by British prizes she had captured.
The French crew was ashore refilling water casks.
The three merchant vessels immediately gave chase. The frigate fled toward the Sunda Strait, abandoning her prizes. The Indiamen, despite being mere cargo ships, managed to catch several of the abandoned vessels and, after firing a few cannon shots, reclaimed them for Britain.
Without their letters of marque, this would have been piracy—merchant vessels attacking and seizing other ships. With the paperwork, it was patriotism.
The Elizabethan Golden Age
No era embraced privateering quite like Elizabethan England. The great names of English exploration—Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Martin Frobisher—were all privateers operating under the Crown's authority. Their expedition reports didn't just fill the treasury with Spanish gold; they mapped unknown waters and sparked an age of exploration.
Queen Elizabeth I played a delicate game. She would issue tacit consent for raids on Spanish shipping, then profess complete innocence when the Spanish ambassador complained. All while taking her cut of the prizes.
Drake's famous circumnavigation of the globe was essentially an extended privateering cruise. He returned to England in 1580 with a ship so stuffed with Spanish treasure that his investors—including the Queen herself—earned a return of about 4,700 percent on their investment. Elizabeth knighted him on the deck of his ship.
The Spanish called him a pirate. The English called him a hero. The only difference was the letter of marque.
The Profit Motive
Privateering could be spectacularly lucrative. During the eight years of the American Revolutionary War, ships from the tiny island of Guernsey—just thirty square miles in the English Channel—captured French and American vessels worth over 145 million pounds in today's money. That's from one small island, in one war.
The ownership of privateering vessels was often divided into eighth shares, spreading both risk and reward among multiple investors. Prize money was split according to pre-agreed formulas among the government, the ship's owners, the captain, and the crew. Even common sailors could hope for a windfall that might exceed years of ordinary wages.
But the risks were equally extreme. Privateering attracted violent men to dangerous work. Ships were lost. Crews were killed or captured. And if your letter of marque was deemed invalid—perhaps issued by a government that lost a civil war—you might find yourself prosecuted as a common pirate and hanged.
The Thin Line
The boundary between privateer and pirate was always precarious. Some men crossed it eagerly.
Captain Luke Ryan, a French-Irish adventurer, commanded six different vessels under three different national flags—sometimes on opposite sides of the same war—in just over two years. He shopped for whatever government would license his raids, treating letters of marque as flags of convenience.
The notorious Lafitte brothers of New Orleans operated under letters of marque that they'd obtained through bribery from corrupt officials of unstable Central American governments. These documents provided a thin veneer of legality over what was essentially organized piracy. The veil was gossamer-thin, but it was enough to make prosecution complicated.
The real difference between privateering and piracy came down to consequences. A privateer who followed the rules—brought prizes to admiralty courts, treated captives honorably, respected neutral ships—enjoyed the protections of the laws of war. If captured, he was entitled to treatment as a prisoner of war.
A pirate was "at war with all the world," a criminal who could be hanged by any nation that caught him.
The Rules of the Game
Letters of marque came with obligations. Privateers were required to obey the laws of war, honor treaty obligations, avoid attacking neutral vessels, and treat captives "as courteously and kindly as they safely could."
Admiralty courts enforced these rules with teeth. They could revoke a letter of marque, refuse to award prize money, forfeit the bonds that privateers had to post, or even award damages against officers and crew who mistreated prisoners or attacked the wrong ships.
The bond requirement was significant. In eighteenth-century Britain, a privateer might have to post fifteen hundred pounds—roughly £285,000 in today's money—as surety for good behavior before receiving his commission. This wasn't pocket change. It ensured that privateers had something to lose if they crossed the line into piracy.
A Question of Sovereignty
Civil wars and rebellions created nightmarish complications. When James II of England was deposed in 1688, he continued issuing letters of marque from exile in France. The new Privy Council of England refused to recognize these documents. Sailors captured while operating under James's letters were prosecuted as pirates.
The American Civil War produced a similar crisis. When Union forces captured the Confederate privateer Savannah in 1861, its crew was put on trial for piracy in New York. The Confederacy responded with a threat: execute these sailors, and we will execute captured Union soldiers in retaliation.
The Union blinked. Confederate privateers were ultimately treated as prisoners of war.
This standoff illustrated a fundamental truth about letters of marque. Their validity depended entirely on the legitimacy of the issuing government—a question that was often impossible to resolve while a war was still being fought.
The End of an Era
European nations had been trying to limit privateering for centuries. England and France agreed to forswear it in treaty after treaty, starting with diplomatic overtures in 1324. Yet privateering recurred in every war between them for the next five hundred years.
Benjamin Franklin tried to persuade France to lead by example and stop issuing letters of marque. The French Convention actually banned the practice during the Revolution, but it was reinstated after the Thermidorian Reaction in 1795. Two years later, the French Navy Ministry was authorized to sell small ships specifically for privateering use.
The end finally came in 1856, after the Crimean War. Seven European states signed the Declaration of Paris, formally renouncing privateering. Forty-five more nations eventually joined them. The era of licensed private warfare at sea was over.
Almost.
The United States never signed the Declaration of Paris. Neither did a handful of other nations. In 1879, when the War of the Pacific broke out, landlocked Bolivia—which had no navy whatsoever—formally offered letters of marque to any ships willing to fight for them. Britain, France, and the United States refused to recognize the legality of Bolivia's offer. Since Chile had already occupied Bolivia's coastal territory and Peru discouraged privateering, nothing came of it.
A Final Misconception
In December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Goodyear commercial blimps began flying anti-submarine patrols off the California coast. The civilian crews carried rifles. This spawned a persistent myth that these airships operated under letters of marque—the last privateers in American history.
It's a wonderful story. It's also completely false.
The Navy would have needed Congressional authorization to issue letters of marque, and none was ever granted. The armed blimps were simply civilians doing dangerous volunteer work in a moment of national crisis, not licensed privateers hunting for prizes.
The age of the letter of marque had truly ended. The strange legal fiction that allowed private citizens to wage war for profit, with their government's blessing and a share of the spoils, belonged to a world that no longer existed.
But for five centuries, it had been one of the most effective weapons in any maritime nation's arsenal—and one of the most reliable paths to either fortune or the gallows.