English Voyages to the Caribbean, 1596 to 1604: An Annotated List

Abstract

N the course of the war between Spain and England from I585 to i604 the Caribbean was one of the main areas of English privateering. Some account of the extent and character of this phenomenon down to the year I596 is already available, and the point of the list of voyages given below is to present a digest of what is now known, on the basis of recent research, about such activity in the later years of the war. The list has been compiled by piecing together scraps of information from Spanish, English, and other sources, notably the High Court of Admiralty records in the Public Record Office in London and the various series in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. Anyone acquainted with the variety of sources bearing upon this subject will recognize that an exhaustive account of the evidence cannot be expected at the present time, if ever, and that such a list as this can only be provisional. Furthermore, the records themselves are certainly deficient, so that even a complete collection of the relevant material could never constitute a comprehensive history of the events. Privateers, prizes, promoters, personnel, and even whole expeditions are bound to be missing from any list, however carefully compiled. There is, nevertheless, enough information of the right kind to justify certain conclusions of general interest. One such conclusion is that the scale of English Caribbean activity did not significantly diminish in the later years of the war. It has sometimes been alleged, on the basis of very little evidence, that the defeat of Sir Francis Drake's West Indies expedition of I595-I596 so strengthened the Spaniards and deterred the English that the latter increasingly desisted from this increasingly hazardous pursuit. That judgment is now shown to be mistaken, for in the eight years before Drake's voyage identifiable English privateers in the West Indies numbered seventy-eight, and in the eight years following it, seventy-two (the ships of Drake's own fleet being omitted from