Ambrose Light was a brigantine

Brigantine

In sailing, a brigantine or hermaphrodite brig is a vessel with two masts, only the forward of which is square rigged.-Origins of the term:...

, captured by the USS Alliance

USS Alliance (1877)

The second USS Alliance was a screw gunboat that was in service from 1877-1911 with the United States Navy.Laid down as Huron, a screw gunboat of the third rate, in 1873 at the Norfolk Navy Yard, Alliance was launched on 8 March 1875. She was sponsored by Miss Eulalie Boush, whose father, Naval...

 as a suspected pirate vessel in 1885. After a legal decision, the ship was returned to her Colombia

Colombia

Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

n owners, in return for costs. The court ruled that the ship could legally be used to transport troops between Colombian ports during the Colombian civil war.

Legal

This incident was the basis for a decision in case law

Case law

In law, case law is the set of reported judicial decisions of selected appellate courts and other courts of first instance which make new interpretations of the law and, therefore, can be cited as precedents in a process known as stare decisis...

 that defines who can be called a pirate in the United States.