In July 1716, Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant-governor of Virginia from 1710 to 1722, wrote to the Board of Trade that a “nest of pirates” endeavoured to “establish themselves at [New] Providence”, warning that these would prove “dangerous to British commerce, if not timely suppressed”. Two years earlier, Henry Pulleine, governor of Bermuda from 1713 to 1718, had warned of pirates operating from New Providence, but the imperial administration had yet to act on the news. Several similar reports by British governors were prompted by the rapid increase of New Providence-based pirates from 1716 onwards and their transition from attacking Spanish vessels in the waters surrounding the Bahamas to indiscriminate attacks on colonial shipping throughout the Caribbean and North America. Despite these reports, the imperial administration only began to gradually respond to pirates from 1717 onwards after England-based mercantile groups complained about the impact of piracy on British transatlantic shipping. Consequently, the immediate responses to piracy in the Caribbean Sea before 1717 relied on the fragmented efforts of naval captains and colonial governments acting against pirates operating in waters near to their respective posts. When such undertakings occurred, they proved extremely limited and produced little change throughout the Caribbean. Similarly, when the British government responded in 1717, the measures imposed were obstructed by the lack of resources available to enact them. The result was that between 1714 and 1718 piracy was left largely unchecked in the Caribbean. This enabled pirates to not only accumulate plunder but also recruit additional crewmembers, capture larger vessels and outfit them with superior firepower in order to facilitate voyages against richer prizes further afield.

The lack of success against pirates prior to 1718 offers the opportunity to explore the factors that dictated the strength of imperial maritime power in extra-European spaces. As has been discussed in previous studies of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy, naval vessels stationed in extra-European spaces during peacetime were primarily instructed to provide for the protection of trade by convoying merchant shipping; the vessels were too few and too scattered to achieve anything beyond this. However, the operational difficulties that naval captains faced when they arrived in the Americas, due to obstructive legislation and environmental conditions, inhibited their ability to carry out these instructions effectively.