Combat
West Indies Anti-Piracy Campaign
The long, grinding effort to clear the Caribbean of pirates.
As Spain's empire dissolved in the independence wars, the line between revolutionary privateering and outright piracy vanished, and the waters around Cuba, Hispaniola, and the Gulf swarmed with raiders preying on American commerce. The United States responded with the West Indies Squadron, commanded in turn by James Biddle and David Porter, the latter assembling a flotilla of small schooners and shallow-draft barges, the "Mosquito Fleet," and basing it forward at Key West in 1823. Marines served throughout as shipboard guards, boarders, and landing parties for raids on the pirate dens ashore. The campaign produced no fleet battles, only a vast accumulation of small captures, chases, and shore actions, often in fever-ridden conditions that killed more men than the pirates did. It was an early school for the kind of amphibious small-war work that would define the Corps.
Engagements in this conflict (16)
Record no. 261