"Nasty vindictiveness."
How about past record, which goes before you in spades?
As somebody famous once said, You'll never eat lunch in this town again.
"WysiwiG, how do you take two such consummate evils and rank them as to which is worse?"
By putting them into context of who was doing what to whom at the time
The events that you describe were being perpetrated by all the Christian "Civilised" nations on the "savages" they were civilising and the man chained for life to an oar - lasted for centuries for these "savages".
On the original point, the pirates who came into Baltimore where said to have done so with the co-operation of the authorities, or certainly, high ranking members of same, implicating England in the abductions   
Jim Carroll