The Corsairs and the Napoleonic Wars

British merchants were constantly pestering the government for special licenses to sail independently without a convoy. And there was an open invitation for all neutral shipping to join any British convoy. Lloyd's of London, a wealthy insurance firm which had a near monopoly on ensuring foreign trade expeditions, was always pressuring the government just as hard to limit these special permissions. The German U-boats of the Second World War sailed from some of the same ports in Western France that had been used by the Corsairs over a hundred years earlier. But the Corsairs and blockades of the Napoleonic era seem pretty quaint by comparison.