Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  Contemporary estimates of the pirate population during the period under consideration placed the number between 1,000 and 2,000 at any one time. In 1717 Philadelphia merchant James Logan estimated that 1,500 pirates were active, 800 of them based at Providence, their Bahamas rendezvous. Three different commentators, from the Bahamas, South Carolina, and Bermuda, put the number at or near 2,000 between 1718 and 1720. The American Weekly Mercury (published in Philadelphia) claimed that 32 pirate ships—which would have carried about 2,400 men—were prowling the Caribbean in late 1720. In the only estimate we have from the other side of the law, by a band of pirates in 1716, “30 Company of them,” again roughly 2,400 men, plied the oceans of the globe.15

  Figure 2. The Caribbean.

  These figures seem broadly accurate.16 From records that describe the activities of pirate ships and from reports or projections of crew sizes, it appears that 1,500 to 2,000 pirates sailed the sea between 1716 and 1718, 1,800 to 2,400 between 1719 and 1722, and 1,000 in 1723, declining rapidly to 500 in 1724, to fewer than 200 by 1725 and 1726. In all, some 4,000 went, as they called it, “upon the account.” The pirates’ chief military enemy, the British Royal Navy, employed an average of only 13,000 hands in any given year between 1716 and 1726. Pirates sailed in well-armed vessels and represented a formidable military force, especially during the years 1718–22, when they were at their peak.17

  Like all earlier pirates, these sea robbers followed a lucrative trade and sought bases for their depredations in places distant from the seats of imperial power, choosing especially the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Bahama Islands, undefended and ungoverned by the Crown, began, in 1716, to attract pirates by the hundreds. Governor Alexander Spotswood noted that pirates used the Bahamas as a “General Rendezvous & seem to look upon those Islands as their own.” Since no government existed in the Bahamas, every man there was, according to a disturbed observer, “doing onely what’s right in his own eyes.” These pirates called themselves the Flying Gang. By 1718 a torrent of complaints moved George I to commission Woodes Rogers to lead an expedition to bring the islands under control. Rogers’s efforts largely succeeded, and pirates scattered in all directions; some sailed north to the unpopulated inlets of the Carolinas, some set their compasses west or south for smaller Caribbean islands, and others headed eastward across the Atlantic to Africa.18

  Pirates had begun to settle in Madagascar as early as 1691; their presence had long caused “a great Deal of uneasiness and Fear in the Several Nations trading to the Indies.” They intermixed with the indigenous population, forming “a dark Mulatto Race,” which, over time, became a new ethnicity. By 1718 Madagascar served as a pirate settlement, an entrepôt for booty, and, for the maritime powers of Europe, a nightmarish model of a place they could not control. Pirates played with the fears of Atlantic rulers by threatening to turn the Bahamas into “a second Madagascar” or to take Bermuda “and make a new Madagascar of it.” At the mouth of the Sierra Leone River on Africa’s western coast, pirates stopped off for “whoring and drinking” and to unload goods. Some authorities feared that pirates might “set up a sort of Commonwealth”—and they were precisely correct in their designation—in these distant regions, since “no Power in those Parts of the World could have been able to dispute it with them.”19 Theaters of operation among pirates shifted, however, according to season, shipping schedules, the availability of prizes, and naval policing designs. But generally, as one pirate noted, these rovers were “dispers’t into several parts of the World.” Sea robbers sought and usually found bases near major trade routes that were as distant as possible from the powers of the state.20

  Did pirates cause a crisis in trade? Captain Charles Johnson believed that pirates were deeply “destructive to the Navigation of the Trading World,” and of course merchants and royal officials in both the colonies and the metropolises warmly agreed, though their comments must be seen as those of self-interested men trying to move the government to protect their own economic enterprises. Governor Spotswood of Virginia was one of the first to sound an alarm that would be repeated again and again over the next ten years; pirates were swarming everywhere, he warned in July 1716, and “the whole Trade of the Continent may be endangered if timely measures be not taken to suppress this growing evil.” The royal pardons did not work, and the community of pirates continued to expand. By April 1717 Virginia merchants were writing, “our Coast is now infested with Pyrates. God knows what damage they’l do to Trade. Ships are dailey going out & coming [back] in.” Sam Bellamy and the pirates of the Whydah had effectively shut down the commerce of the Chesapeake Bay, and shippers’ fears multiplied; nervous captains now assumed that every sail on the horizon was a pirate.21

  Other regions were affected according to the ebbs and flows of pirate expeditions and the patrols of the small number of naval warships based in the Americas. When Blackbeard and his crew blockaded Charleston in April 1717 to procure medicines with which to treat their sick and wounded, a South Carolinian wrote, “The Trade of this Place was totally interrupted,” and the whole province was in “a great Terror.” Bartholomew Roberts and his convoy paralyzed trade in the West Indies in late 1721. Shortly thereafter, in July 1722, Philadelphia felt the shock when its entire trade halted for a week. The cries of merchants and officials continued to make their way across the Atlantic to the seat of empire in London: “except [unless] effectual measures are taken the whole trade of America must soon be ruin’d.” If the depredations continued unchecked, “all the English Plantations in America will be totally ruin’d in a very short time.” Governor Hamilton of Antigua expressed the anguish of the planters on the small islands of the West Indies. “What,” he wondered, “have we that lyes not at the mercy of these villains?” The problem was so severe as to force imperial rivals to cooperate; in 1721 the British and French governments in the Lesser Antilles agreed to common military protection against pirates. One imperial observer claimed that piracy was damaging not only transatlantic and intercolonial trade but also industry in England. The American and African trades, which carried manufactures in their outward passages, seemed especially hard hit.22

  One of the greatest claims for the crisis was made by Captain Johnson, who stated that between 1716 and 1726 pirates captured more vessels and did greater damage to trade than had been done by the combined naval and privateering campaigns that Spain and France undertook during the War of Spanish Succession. This is an extraordinary statement. Could a few thousand ragged outlaws be more powerful than the combined naval and privateering forces of two of the world’s greatest nations? Historian Ralph Davis has estimated that England lost about two thousand vessels during the war but added that its own maritime predations captured roughly an equal, if not slightly larger, number of vessels. By this equation, there can be no doubt that Johnson was right. Let us look at the matter more closely.23

  The impact of piracy on trade can be estimated in two complementary ways. First, by looking at contemporaneous comments (some of them provided by pirates themselves), we can suggest roughly how many merchant vessels pirates captured and plundered. The crew of Bartholomew Roberts alone took more than 400 craft between 1719 and 1722. Edward Low and his gang took approximately 140 vessels, Blackbeard perhaps fewer. Sam Bellamy and his fellow pirates captured more than 50 before they were fatally shipwrecked in a storm. Others who took sizable numbers included Edward England and Charles Vane (at least 50 each), Charles Harris (45), Francis Spriggs (40), James Phillips (34), George Lowther (33), and Richard Holland (25). If we estimate that the remaining seventy or so pirate captains took an average of 20 vessels each (roughly the average after we remove the highest figures, to produce a conservative estimate), we would get a total of more than 2,400 vessels captured and plundered.24

  Most of these captures were not total losses, and indeed a few of them resulted in the loss of little or no cargo at all. In a letter to his employing shipowner in 1719, Captain William Snelgrave provided a list of
ships recently captured by pirates around the Sierra Leone River in West Africa, a few of them with the notation “Plundered but little.” If the vessel was small, or if the captain proved to have “a good character,” pirates often returned the prize to its crew after modest takings. In some cases all they wanted was food and drink, and in others they had no use for the cargo, not least because they had lost many of their connections to merchants who might at an earlier point have fenced the goods for them. In most instances, big shipments of sugar, tobacco, or slaves were out of the question for pirates; they simply had no way to sell them and hence no use for them.25

  But if these circumstances diminish in one direction the significance of the total number of prizes taken by pirates, two other circumstances expand it in the other. First, there were very few compensatory captures, by Britain or anyone else, to balance these losses, as only a few pirate ships were taken, and fewer still were flush with treasure. Perhaps even more important, a significant portion of the vessels that pirates took as prizes were completely destroyed, evidence of which we have glimpsed earlier. Unlike navies and privateers, pirates routinely sunk or burned their prizes, which increased the short- and long-term economic losses to shipping and commerce and prompted numerous complaints by royal officials. General Peter Heywood, commander in chief of Jamaica, wrote to the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1716 that pirates were taking half the vessels bound to and from English, French, and Spanish Caribbean settlements, “and very often burn their vessels and others they disable just leaving them sufficient to bring them down.” It would appear that Captain Johnson knew whereof he spoke and may in the end have underestimated the damage freebooters did to commerce. Historians, unlike merchants and officials of the early eighteenth century, may have not noticed, but pirates did create something approaching a crisis in trade, which helps to account for the hugely indicative fact that there was zero growth in English shipping from 1715 to 1728, a prolonged period of stagnation between two phases of extensive growth.26

  The second way of exploring the impact of piracy on trade is through a sizable (though not random or comprehensive) sample of 545 vessels taken by pirates between 1716 and 1726. The peak years for capture were, as the aforementioned merchants and officials seem to suggest, 1717, 1718, 1720, and 1722. The sample also suggests a dramatic expansion of captures in 1717 and a fairly rapid decline after 1724, a pattern consistent with evidence presented in other chapters about the temporal rise and decline of piracy in the late golden age. It may also be of correlative significance that the years in which the greatest number of pirates were hanged were 1718 (110) and 1722 (148). Pirates disrupted some of the most lucrative zones of international trade, especially the West Indies, North America, and West Africa, where almost all (95 percent) of their prizes were taken. In the sample, roughly 11 percent of the vessels captured were known to be severely damaged or destroyed. If applied to the larger projection of 2,400 craft captured, this suggests that pirates ruined more than 250 ships. The conclusion must be that the merchants and officials knew whereof they spoke when they complained about the “infestation” of pirates and the tremendous damage they did to trade.27

  To complete the overview, and to provide a temporal map to guide the reader in the following chapters, I note that the piracies of 1716–26 passed through three discernible stages. The first of these, as I have indicated, began soon after the Peace of Utrecht ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713 and became a matter of international significance in 1716. Many of the early pirates had been privateers who preyed on the commercial vessels of Spain and France and whose external circumstances—and hence legal definition—changed with the ending of the war. Pirates with captains such as Benjamin Hornigold, John Jennings, and Philip Cockram continued to attack their traditional enemies. They even announced to one captured ship captain that “they meddle not with English or Dutch, but that they never consented to the Articles of Peace with the French and Spaniards.” As we will see in the next chapter, they drew self-consciously on the traditions of the buccaneers and established themselves as a community based in the Bahama Islands. They carried out almost all of their piracies in the West Indies, but altogether they captured only about 8 percent of the prizes taken during the ten-year span.28

  A division soon developed among these pirates, opening the second—and most dramatic—stage in the history of piracy in the early eighteenth century. This stage began in 1717 when a multiethnic but mostly English crew of pirates overthrew Hornigold as commander because “he refused to take and plunder English vessels,” which were, after all, the most numerous and often the richest vessels to be found in the Caribbean and the adjoining Atlantic. This stage, which lasted until 1722, was the greatest period of the golden age, the time when more than 70 percent of all prizes were captured, and indeed the time that produced the most enduring images of pirates. This was the heyday of Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts, the “great pirate” whose successes at sea dwarfed all others. Another critical development in this phase was the reestablishment of royal authority in the Bahama Islands by Woodes Rogers in 1718, thereby destroying the pirate rendezvous. In the resulting scatter, the pirates vastly expanded their theater of operation, moving up the coast of North America, across the Atlantic to West Africa, and around the Cape of Good Hope to Madagascar and the Indian Ocean as their forebears had done in the 1690s. The years 1718–22 represented the moment when common men of the deep gained control of the enterprise of piracy and used it for their own purposes, independent of the economic projects of the upper classes of the day. By 1720 the main purpose was no longer booty. It was, rather, the perpetuation of a “life of liberty.”29

  The third stage began in roughly 1722, with the naval defeat of Roberts and his two big ships and three hundred men off the coast of West Africa, and lasted until 1726, when Atlantic piracy effectively came to an end. In this phase the struggle turned murderous. Hundreds of pirates were killed in military actions or on the gallows as merchants and governmental officials set about exterminating robbery by sea and the alternative way of life it represented. Those pirates who remained at sea, in response, became more desperate and more violent and killed more of their captives, as they knew that they faced almost certain death for their actions. The years 1722–26 were a time when pirates fought less for booty than for their very survival. Their determination was more than matched by national governments, led by Great Britain. The result would be a bloodbath.30

  The seaman who stood on the brink of piracy in 1716 knew that the world was divided into vast geopolitical empires, that wealth coursed through the trading veins of the Atlantic, that deep-sea ships were its carriers, and that seamanship was a key to it all. He knew that times were hard and that the overextended empires offered opportunities to those willing to risk their necks by becoming pirates. He did not know, however, that the next ten years would be a “golden age” of piracy. He did not know that thousands of people would go “upon the account.” He did not know that those who did would capture hundreds, or indeed thousands, of ships, destroy many, and disrupt the Atlantic trading system. Finally, he did not know how many would die during an unprecedented wave of violent repression. Let us explore more closely the people who, out of ignorance, desperation, and hope, chose this fate.

  3. Who Will Go “a Pyrating”?

  WALTER KENNEDY WAS BORN at Pelican Stairs, Wapping, the sailor town of London, in 1695, the year in which Henry Avery, “the maritime Robin Hood,” led a mutiny, turned pirate, and captured a treasure ship in the Indian Ocean. Kennedy’s family, like his community, lived by the sea. His father was an anchor smith “who gave his son Walter the best education he was able.” The times were hard, and so was young Kennedy—he was poor, illiterate, known to have “a too aspiring temper,” and often on the wrong side of the law. It was said that in his childhood he was “bred a Pick-Pocket” and that he later became a housebreaker. Meanwhile he served an apprenticeship to his father, but this came to an abrupt end when
the old man died. Kennedy promptly gave his father’s effects to his mother and brothers and “followed his own roving inclinations and went to sea.” He served a long stint on a man-of-war in the War of Spanish Succession. There he heard the stories told on the lower deck about “the exploits of the pirates, both in the East and West Indies, and of their having got several islands into their possession, wherein they settled, and in which they exercised a sovereign power.” Kennedy “became more than ordinarily attentive whenever stories of that sort were told, and sought every opportunity of putting his fellow sailors upon such relations.” He learned of the adventures of Morgan, Avery, and other “maritime desperadoes,” committing to memory their “principal expeditions.” These tales “had [a] wonderful effect on Walter’s disposition,” creating in him “a secret ambition of making a figure in the same way.” The yarns set him on his life’s course.1

  Kennedy was part of the naval force sent with Woodes Rogers in an expedition to the Bahamas, to “recover that island by reducing the pirates, who then had it in their possession” and had “fortified themselves in several places.” Kennedy’s personal purpose, it seems, was not to assist in suppressing the pirates but rather to find and join them. Once he got to Providence, he shipped himself as a merchant seaman with several “reformed pirates” on the Buck sloop, in which he and five others (including Howell Davis and Thomas Anstis, both destined to be pirate captains) “conspired together to go off Pyrating with the Vessel.” This core of conspirators would evolve into the most successful gang of pirates in the entire golden age.2

  Kennedy would make a reputation for himself among the pirates as “a bold and daring Fellow, but very wicked and profligate.” With the elected captain Howell Davis, he took part in several daring attacks against slave-trading fortresses in West Africa. The crew first assaulted the Portuguese at Saint Jago, then undertook a bigger, bolder action against Gambia Castle, where they captured “about two thousand Pounds Sterling in Bar Gold” and ended by “dismounting the Guns, and demolishing the Fortifications” of the castle. The next target was the fort at Sierra Leone, which was likewise taken and plundered. When Davis was subsequently killed by Portuguese soldiers at yet another slave-trading fortress, on the Princes Islands, Kennedy led a contingent of thirty pirates on a mission to avenge their fallen comrade. He conducted the company up a steep hill, “directly up under the fire of their Ship Guns” and into the slave factory, where the very sight of them caused the Portuguese guards to quit their posts and take flight. Kennedy and his gang “march’d in without Opposition, set Fire to the Fort, and threw all the Guns off the Hill into the Sea, which after they had done, they retreated quietly to their Ship.”3