The navy in the Caribbean, like its commanders-in-chief, had been a somewhat intermittent institution and presence. It was present when a war was taking place between England/Britain and a European power with colonial interests in the region, but in practice in peacetime it had usually been only a minimal presence. Before the sequence of French wars which began in 1689, the navy's presence was not so much minimal as only partly naval, in the sense that it did not have a professional, official organisation in the Caribbean, but utilised buccaneers and pirates who were given local ranks. There was, that is, no institutional naval presence.

The personnel who manned the ships were usually buccaneers who were hired in wartime to serve in their own ships of war; these could be counted as a quasi-naval force, especially when placed under the command of an officer bearing a commission from the king or from a colonial governor (though all too often that officer was himself a buccaneer – Morgan is the prime example). Before the buccaneers, who only became prominent from the 1660s, there were the privateers, who could be counted as naval only by a difficult twisting of the language; they were even less official than the buccaneers, since a licence to act as a private ship of war could only be seen as exercising naval power at the most uncontrolled extreme, and completely outside any sort of central authority. Before the privateers there had been the out-and-out pirates, seamen who preyed on the people of the Caribbean without any justification other than the desire to steal, and the willingness to kill.

The shift from piracy to an official and consistent navy presence took about two centuries, from the days of Drake and Hawkins in the 1560s (or even from the French privateers in the 1520s) to the establishment of a full-time command in Jamaica under Rear-Admiral Charles Stewart in 1729. Before Stewart's appointment the only permanent naval presence was the Port Royal dockyard, and that was little more than a careenage; until Stewart, local commanders-in-chief had been active campaigners, such as Hosier and his unfortunate successors in 1726–1728, but only in wartime.