Privateers of Rhode Island gained experience which was useful in both in smuggling cargos into New England, and avoiding payment of English taxes,
and also in attacking the English.

Since its founding the colony of Rhode Island was an agreeable place for pirates to outfit. Read about Rhode Island pirates.

It is a short move to go from being a pirate or from being a merchant ship to becoming a privateer.  A privateer is an armed private vessel which bears the written commission of a sovereign power to seize the commerce or war vessels of the enemy.  In short a privateer a legalized form of piracy.

Privateering was popular from 1550 to 1815, a period in which most countries did not have enough navel vessels to conduct effective maritime wars.  With the help of commercial privateers an effective war might be fought at sea.  Thus, at the beginning of the War of 1812, Thomas Jefferson pointed out that: "In the United States, every possible encouragement should be given to privateering in time of war with a commercial nation"

Privateers were after easy prizes, so they went after unarmed or lightly armed merchant ships.  A typical privateer ship was a fast merchant ship to which swivel guns (a sort of big shotgun, useful as anti-personnel weapons) and some cannons were added.  Extra sailors were engaged as crew, to sail captured ships home to a friendly port.

By 1760, Governor Hopkins of Rhode Island wrote English Prime Minister that "many Rhode Island merchants changed the course of their Common Trade into that of Privateering, so that there hath been already about Fifty Privateers fitted out from hence."

The total of Rhode Island privateers commissioned by Rhode Island or the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War is probably about 140. [Hawes, Off Soundings", p. 97]
 

[Book references in brackets] on any page in this website are to books, or other materials, listed in the Joseph Bucklin Society Library Catalog  -- a resource bibliography for scholarly study of the Gaspee. [Number references in brackets] in this text indicates a footnote reference to a source given in the endnotes of this text. UNKNOWN indicates that although the event occurred, the time or place is still a subject for further research on the subject person.