transferred operations on the coast to Jamaica; many privateers began using the Cayman Islands as a forward base for attacks on the isthmus. Pirate havens and illicit commerce Pirates or buccaneers, some of whom were formerly privateers, took over much of activity of the earlier privateers, especially during the Golden Age of Piracy (1660–1720). Operating from bases within the Caribbean, such as Tortuga and later Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, pirates regularly raided Spanish possessions and shipping along the whole of the Western Caribbean. They frequently stopped to re-supply at such places as Rio de la Hacha, Darien (which they also used as a base for raids on Panama or to cross to the Pacific) or the Miskito areas. When the European colonial powers began to suppress piracy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, colonial merchants often used the same havens to deliver goods from northern Europe to Spanish markets. The Spanish Crown's restrictive trade policies, granting of monopolies to favored domestic suppliers, and inability to produce consumer goods cheaply, made smuggling a major activity for English, Dutch and French merchants. The lucrative trade also enriched the indigenous groups of the area, but attracted frequent Spanish expeditions against them. In the eighteenth century, ships from English colonies, but particularly Jamaica and also North America, regularly visited the Miskito Kingdom and Belize. Many of the commercial vessels were from Jamaica and New York City, but ships also came from New England. In 1718 General Shute the governor of Massachusetts dispatched a warship to protect their interests during the Anglo-Spanish War. The Miskito Kingdom and English settlements The Miskito people, who had formed a "Kingdom of the Mosquitos" made an alliance with Great Britain in the late 1630s. They were joined around 1640 by the survivors of a rebellion on board a slave ship who wrecked the craft at Cape Gracias a Dios. The Miskito took the rebels in and intermarried with them, creating a mixed-race group called Miskitos-Zambos. By the early eighteenth century this group had taken over the Mosquito Kingdom and were raiding far and wide throughout Central America. Capitalizing on a long term alliance with the English of Jamaica, they placed themselves under the protection of England and both prevented Spanish occupation of the area while allowing the English the security to found their colony in British Honduras (Belize). In the late seventeenth century, Englishmen began to