Logwood also played an important role in the lives of 17th-century
buccaneers and into the
Golden Age of Piracy. Spain claimed all of Central and
South America as its sovereign territory through the 17th and 18th centuries; despite that, English, Dutch, and French sailors recognized the value of logwood and set up camps to cut and collect the trees for shipment back to Europe. Spain periodically sent privateers to capture the logwood cutters – for example,
Juan Corso's 1680 cruise – sometimes in retaliation for buccaneer raids on Spanish cities. Logwood cutters, by then out of work, frequently joined pirate and buccaneer crews to raid the Spanish in return, as
Edmund Cooke did after losing two logwood-hauling ships to the Spanish. When Spanish forces ejected a great many hunters and logwood cutters in 1715, they flocked to
Nassau and swelled the already-considerable numbers of pirates gathering there. By the mid-1720s logwood cutters had themselves become targets of pirates such as
Francis Spriggs,
Edward Low, and
George Lowther; pirate captains
Samuel Bellamy and
Blackbeard went further, turning captured logwood-hauling
sloops into pirate vessels. Logwood cutting was profitable – "According to a government report, in the four years 1713 to 1716, some 4,965 tons of logwood were exported to England at not less than £60,000 per annum" – but brought in only a fraction of the profits from tobacco and other legal exports, and "was always a minor industry carried on by a few hundred ex-seamen and pirates in a remote corner of the globe". ==Gallery==