Term
King's pardon
also known as General pardon, Pardon proclamation
Definition
A formal proclamation by the English Crown offering full pardon to any pirate who surrendered to a colonial authority by a stated date and undertook to abandon piracy. The most consequential of these was the proclamation issued by George I on 5 September 1717, which set a deadline of 5 September 1718 and was carried into the Caribbean by the new Bahamas governor Woodes Rogers when he arrived at Nassau in July 1718. Hundreds of pirates accepted the pardon, including Benjamin Hornigold, who subsequently operated as a pirate-hunter under Rogers’s commission. Those who refused or returned to piracy after accepting — among them Blackbeard (who accepted a pardon from North Carolina Governor Eden before resuming piracy), Charles Vane, and Bartholomew Roberts’s subsequent crew — were the principal targets of the suppression campaigns that followed.
