There were struggling for growth a rough agriculture and a hampered trade with Barbados, Virginia, and New England--trade likewise with the buccaneers who swarmed in the West Indian waters.
Five hundred good reasons allowed, and had long allowed, free bootery to flourish in American seas.

Gross governmental faults, Navigation Acts, and a hundred petty and great oppressions, general poverty, adventurousness, lawlessness, and sympathy of mishandled folk with lawlessness, all combined to keep Brother of the Coast, Buccaneer, and Filibuster alive, and their ships upon all seas.

Many were no worse than smugglers; others were robbers with violence; and a few had a dash of the fiend.

All nations had sons in the business.

England to the south in America had just the ragged coast line, with its off-lying islands and islets, liked by all this gentry, whether smuggler or pirate outright.
Through much of the seventeenth century the settlers on these shores never violently disapproved of the pirate.