Im Not a Pirate, Im a Privateer: The Letters of Marque

Samantha Hughes Senior Division Individual Website

Process Paper I spent awhile just thinking and brainstorming over rights and responsibilities. Coming up with topics and ideas that werent examples from the nhd website, nor examples my teacher had given our class as examples. I wanted to pick a topic that was a bit out there, slightly vague, but fun to research and do. That led me to researching my own roots and finding out I was surprisingly related to Jean Lafitte, a famous privateer and pirate. Going a bit more in depth and do looking at exactly just what a privateer was, I discovered the letters of marque, and thus, the topic I had been looking for. I started off just doing basic research online and compiling the all the information I thought I might need, along with just some extra tidbits, and sorting everything together in order of what each source was about. For instance my main two categories were The Letters of Marque and Privateers. It took a bit longer than expected to get all of the information due to the fact there arent as many studies on the actual documents I wanted to research than privateers and the time periods that werent Wikipedia. After this for every source I had uncovered or questions Id brought myself, I confirmed it on each source and took notes on each of my resources. However, I still wanted something a bit more to learn about these documents. So I went through my brainstorming process again and found transcripts or actual Letters of Marque from various time periods and nations, to be my best bet. It was these documents that became my my most important primary sources. I chose to present my research in a website because Id programmed a few websites before and truly enjoyed doing them. I started off deciding which tabs I wanted for my website, then moving onto subsections. Making sure all of the information I had collected and wanted to useg would easily fit together in that form as it did in my original mental picture of it. After that I

went through and made an outline for each of the pages with the element placers provided. Coming up with a general outlining on how I wanted to place my findings and any other visual aids I may find along the way to help get my point across. My project relates to the theme in many ways, though I emphasize mainly on one angle of it. That angle being the rights and responsibilities that the Letters of Marque gave to the newfound privateers. It also shows what responsibilities they had to the crown and the lives they were expected to lead for their nation, less be tried as a pirate and most likely executed. The Letters of Marque were an extremely important part of our history, having major parts in many wars, including both of the United States wars with England and the last large-scale privateering in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. (Word Count: 496)