The founding of Port Royal and the opening of its harbour to the buccaneers by Governor Modyford in 1663 provided a base from which those sea rovers and thieves could continue, unofficially, the war begun by Cromwell against Spanish power in the Caribbean. This was not the overt intention of the buccaneers, of course, but by welcoming them as customers, Colonels D’Oyley and Modyford and other governors were protecting themselves and Jamaica both from the buccaneers themselves, and from Spanish counter-attacks; they had in fact recruited many of the buccaneers to English service. Between them, Penn and Venables and Goodson had taken most of the English fleet back to England; any remaining ships did not last long, and were not replaced. By directing the buccaneers especially towards Spanish territory – for there was effectively no other target for their depredations – the Jamaican authorities were also profiting from their activities.

That may have been the theory – or excuse – as developed afterwards, and it was certainly a major consequence of the use of Port Royal by the buccaneers, but, of course, it did not wholly work out that way. The buccaneers may have been mostly English in origin, at least at first, but they had largely separated themselves from English norms of behaviour, and were essentially stateless persons; at the same time they could be seen, institutionally, as descended from the privateers and pirates of Elizabethan times, who operated mainly in European waters and were as savage and unpleasant in their methods as any of the Caribbean buccaneers.

The buccaneers’ activities, nonetheless, were harnessed, if not by the English government, at least by the Jamaican governors and Jamaican opinion, eventually in the person of Thomas Modyford, governor from 1663 to 1670, but also by his immediate predecessors, Lord Windsor and Sir Charles Lyttleton, between 1660 and 1663. The seizure of Jamaica by the Penn-Venables expedition rankled in the Spanish government as only such a deed could in a government which had both failed to protect the colony and had then failed through lethargy and incompetence to recover it.