Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  Kennedy was a man full of rage, or so it appeared in encounters with two ship captains off the coast of Africa in 1719. He decided to take as booty the wig of the captured captain William Snelgrave, who in turn tried to prevent him, and for his resistance got a stern and angry lecture: “I give you this Caution; never to dispute the Will of a Pirate: For, supposing I had cleft your Scull asunder for your impudence, what would you have got by it but destruction? Indeed you may flatter your self, I should have been put to death for killing a Prisoner in cold Blood; but assure your self my Friends would have brought me off on such an Occasion.” Kennedy thus taunted his prisoner with the leveling force of death, contempt for the English legal system, and faith in his comrades, all of which gushed out of a tussle over a symbol of class privilege, the wig.4 When the pirates later took Captain Thomas Grant, Kennedy declared, “Damn you I know you and will sacrifice you & then with his fist struck the informant with great Violence upon his Mouth which occasioned his Nose & Mouth to Bleed.” Kennedy wanted to kill Grant for some unstated previous offense but was prevented from doing so by his shipmates. The matter was finally resolved by the common council in debate, wherein it was decided that Grant should live but his ship should be sunk, as indeed it was. Both instances suggest that Kennedy’s piracy was at least in part a raging rebellion against the powerlessness he had suffered as a working sailor.5

  Sailing now with Bartholomew Roberts (after the death of Davis), Kennedy soon decided to separate. His opportunity came when Roberts took off after a prize, leaving Kennedy, as lieutenant, in charge of one of the ships, in which he promptly sailed away (in turn leaving Roberts with a certain aversion to Irishmen ever after). Kennedy was “now chosen Captain of the revolted Crew,” even though he had small skill in navigation. (He was apparently “preferred to the Command merely for his Courage.”) But the crew itself decided to disband “and every Man to shift for himself, as he could see Occasion.” Kennedy ended up shipwrecked in Scotland, where he either spent his gold or was robbed of it, then shipped out to Ireland and eventually to London, although several of his gang got themselves captured and hanged in Edinburgh. He soon kept a bawdy house on Deptford Road and indulged in an occasional robbery on the side until one of the women of the house informed on him and got him committed to the Bridewell (a workhouse), where the mate of a ship he had plundered found him and had him committed to Marshalsea Prison on capital charges of piracy. He was convicted by a judge of the Court of Admiralty, whose symbolic silver oar lay on the table during the proceedings.6

  Once in prison, Kennedy did all he could to save his own life, including snitching on his comrades. He presented a list of thirteen men to the authorities, but since he had no idea where many of them were, only one was taken up, and even he was subsequently reprieved. The rest were “not to be found.” The sellout was to no avail, and to have done so may have taken its own toll: “After sentence [of death], he showed much less concern for life than is usual for persons in that condition. He was so much tired with the miseries and misfortunes which for some years before he had endured, that death appeared to him a thing rather desirable than frightful.”7

  When he heard that one of his fellow pirates, John Bradshaw—who had also gotten death—had his sentence commuted to convict transportation, Kennedy “expressed great satisfaction” and was happier than “if he himself had received mercy.” He worried, “should I be banished into America as he is, ’tis highly probable I might be tempted to my old way of life, and so instead of reforming, add to the number of my sins.” As he was carried by cart to his execution, trailing the silver oar of the Admiralty, the pirate who had shared in gold and silver plunder spoke these words to someone who accompanied him to the gallows: “when we go to death, we have not wherewith to purchase a coffin to bury us.” He had come home: he was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping, the neighborhood of his birth, on July 21, 1721. He was twenty-six years old.8

  The last point to be made is that Kennedy loved stories; he loved to hear about Henry Avery and no doubt others and loved to tell tales of his own piracies. He “took a particular delight in relating what happened to him in [his piratical] expeditions, even after they had brought him to misery and confinement.” Storytelling was a sailor’s art, as noted by the writer who met with Kennedy and told his story in a chapbook hawked about the streets after his execution: “Men of that profession have usually good memories with respect, at least, to such matters” as the history of piracy.9

  One of the stories he told was about self-government among the pirates. The writer of his life called it “that form of rule which these wretches set up, in imitation of the legal government, and of those regulations there made to supply the place of moral honesty.” As Kennedy explained,

  They chose a captain from amongst themselves, who in effect held little more than that title, excepting in an engagement, when he commanded absolutely and without control. Most of them [the pirates] having suffered formerly from the ill-treatment of their officers, provided carefully against any such evil, now they had the choice in themselves. By their orders they provided especially against quarrels which might happen among themselves, and appointed certain punishments for anything that tended that way; for the due execution thereof they constituted other officers besides the captain, so very industrious were they to avoid putting too much power into the hands of one man.10

  In the end, Walter Kennedy was not only a pickpocket, a housebreaker, and a proprietor of a whorehouse; not only a rebel full of courage and rage, solidarity and treachery; not only a force of destruction against the slave trade; but a seafaring storyteller, and one with ideas, even a political philosophy that was not, as we will see, an imitation of “the legal government” but rather a critique of it. To what extent and in what ways he was a typical pirate will become clear in this chapter as we explore the social origins of those who sailed under the black flag.

  Who became a pirate after the War of Spanish Succession? Almost all who went “upon the account” had labored as merchant seamen, Royal Navy sailors, privateersmen, fishermen, or “Baymen” (sailors turned lumberjacks).11 The vast majority came from captured merchantmen as volunteers, for reasons suggested by Samuel Johnson’s observation that “no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned.... A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”12 Many sailors, of course, had made the comparison themselves, waking up punch drunk or just plain drunk in the jails of the port cities or in the holds of outward-bound merchant ships. Johnson’s point, however, was that the lot of the merchant seamen in the early eighteenth century was a difficult one. Sailors suffered cramped, claustrophobic quarters, “food” that was often as rotten as it was meager, and more. They experienced as a matter of course devastating disease, disabling accidents, shipwreck, and premature death. They faced discipline from their officers that was brutal at best and often murderous. And they got small return for their death-defying labors, for peacetime wages were low and fraud in payment was frequent. Seamen could expect little relief from the law, whose purpose in the eighteenth-century Atlantic was, according to Jesse Lemisch, “to assure a ready supply of cheap, docile labor.” Merchant seamen also had to contend with impressment as practiced by the Royal Navy.13

  Some pirates had served in the navy, where conditions aboard ship were no less harsh. Wages, especially during wartime, were lower than in the merchant service, and the quantity and quality of food aboard the ship, although sometimes better than what could be had in the merchant service, were consistently undermined by corrupt pursers and officers. Organizing cooperation and maintaining order among the huge number of maritime workers on naval vessels required violent discipline—replete with intentionally spectacular executions—that was considerably more severe than on merchant ships. Another consequence of the numbers of sailors crowded onto ill-ventilated naval ships was the omnipresence of disease, often o
f epidemic proportions. In an irony pirates would have savored, one official reported that the navy had trouble fighting freebooters because the King’s ships were “so much disabled by sickness, death, and desertion of their seamen.”14 In 1722 the Crown sent the Weymouth and the Swallow in search of a pirate convoy. Surgeon John Atkins, noting that merchant seamen were frequently pressed, underlined precisely what these sailors had to fear when he recorded that the “Weymouth, who brought out of England a Compliment [sic] of 240 Men,” had “at the end of the Voyage 280 dead upon her Books.”15 Epidemics, consumption, and scurvy raged on royal ships, and the men were “caught in a machine from which there was no escape, bar desertion, incapacitation, or death.” Robert Deal of Port Royal, Jamaica, was one of many who deserted naval vessels for the pirates. John Upton, an old salt who had spent twenty-eight years aboard a man-of-war, finally had had enough and in 1725 joined the crew of the pirate captain Joseph Cooper aboard the Night Rambler.16

  Life was a little better on a privateering vessel; the food was superior, the pay was higher, the work shifts were shorter, and the power of the crew in decision making was greater. But privateers were not always happy ships. Some captains ran their ships like naval vessels, imposing rigid discipline and other unpopular measures that occasionally generated grievances, protests, and even outright mutinies. Woodes Rogers, gentleman captain of a hugely successful privateering voyage in 1708 and later the scourge of the pirates of the West Indies as royal governor of the Bahama Islands (with whom Kennedy sailed), clapped into irons a man named Peter Clark, who had wished himself “aboard a Pirate” and said that “he should be glad that an Enemy, who could over-power us, was a-long-side of us.” One privateering crew, learning of a peace that happened to break out, “sett their Captain ashore and turned Pirate.” John Atkins, the naval surgeon, spoke of the transition from privateer to pirate as going from “plundering for others, to do it for themselves.”17

  The fisheries of Newfoundland also served as recruiting grounds for pirates in the early eighteenth century, explained Captain Charles Johnson. Vessels from the west of England (Topsham, Barnstaple, Bristol) “transport over a considerable Number of poor Fellows every Summer, whom they engage at Low Wages, and are by their Terms to pay for Passage back to England.” These men, because of “the Hardness of their Labour” and “the Chillness of the Nights,” drank lots of “black strap” (made of rum, molasses, chowder, and beer), which was sold to them by the merchants at exorbitant rates. They inevitably fell into debt and were forced to indenture themselves; many of them ran away to join the pirates at the first opportunity. Richard Neal, a young Irishman without education and born in Cork, had been a fisherman but ended up becoming a fellow mutineer to Philip Roche in 1721. John Rose Archer, who had sailed with Blackbeard in 1718, tried to avoid the gallows by lying low, working in the Newfoundland fisheries. But in 1723, when John Phillips began to cruise the region under the black flag, Archer could not resist returning to what Kennedy called “his old way of life.” The decision would, in turn, cost him his life.18

  Some pirates had been “Baymen,” or logwood cutters, a rugged occupation at the edge of the empire, in the Bay of Honduras or the Bay of Campeche, on the eastern and western sides of the Yucatán Peninsula. Both places were inhabited by mariners, renegades, and castaways who cut logwood in the mangrove swamps to sell to Jamaica merchants, who would in turn ship it to Europe for use as a dye in the textile industry. These people lived after the collectivist seafaring tradition of “one and all,” holding all things “in common,” sharing their provisions and especially their liquor. They were famous for their drinking bouts. They devised their own autonomous government and social rules, one of which prohibited capital punishment. When Spanish authorities attacked both logging settlements in retribution for piracies that had occurred up to 1717, they made the problem worse, for themselves and everyone else, since the men who were once employed, reported a royal official in Jamaica, “turn’d pirates and infested all our seas.” Pirates such as Edward Low and George Blacketer came from this seafaring-gone-ashore milieu.19

  Other pirates had been indentured servants, especially the fourteen-year variety, which meant that they had been transported to the colonies in punishment for crimes committed in England. Governor Nicholas Lawes of Jamaica complained to the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1718:

  Those people have been so farr, from altering their evil courses and way of living and becoming an advantage to us, that the greatest part of them are gone and have induced others to go with them a pyrating, and have inveglied and encouraged severall negroes to desart from their masters and go to the Spaniards in Cuba, the few that remains proves a wicked lazy and indolent people, so that I could heartily wish this country might be troubled wth. no more [of] them.

  Most of these runaways had probably been sailors, and indeed this underlines the main point about the occupational background of those who went “a pyrating”: they came overwhelmingly from seafaring employments. Most had been merchant seamen, many had been in the navy and/or privateering, some had been fishermen, baymen, or servants, and a few had been bargemen and turtlers. Piracy emphatically was not an option for most landlubbers, since sea robbers “entertain’d so contemptible a Notion of Landmen.” Men who went “upon the account” were familiar with a single-sex community of work and the rigors of life—and death—at sea.20

  There were two fundamental ways of becoming a pirate. The more spectacular but less common was Walter Kennedy’s way, by mutiny, during which sailors boldly and collectively seized control of a merchant vessel, drew up articles, stitched together a Jolly Roger, and “declared War against all the World.” At least thirty-one mutinies erupted on merchant ships during the 1710s and 1720s, many of them on vessels involved in the African slave trade. Roughly half of these crews moved into piracy. Phineas Bunce and Daniel Macarty organized a mutiny aboard a vessel in the Caribbean in 1718; it commenced when the crew began to sing “Did not you promise me, that you would marry me?” Other rebellious crews who turned pirate were led by Howell Davis (1718), George Lowther (1721), Philip Roche (1721), John Phillips (1723), John Gow (1725), and William Fly (1726), almost all of whom would subsequently be killed in action or hanged on the gallows. (George Lowther committed suicide.) The names of the leaders of several other mutinous crews are lost to us. Since there were about eighty pirate ships for the period 1716–26, it would seem that roughly one in five ships—and probably one in five pirates—got its start in shipboard insurrection, a revolution in miniature.21

  Most men, it follows, became pirates the second way, by volunteering when their merchant vessels were taken. Colonel Benjamin Bennett wrote to the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1718, setting forth his worries about freebooters in the West Indies: “I fear they will soon multiply for so many are willing to joyn with them when taken.” Governor Spotswood of Virginia feared the same thing: the numbers of pirates were growing even though “they will force no man into their service.” The pirates with Thomas Cocklyn told captive William Snelgrave that when they took ships, they met with no resistance, “For the People were generally glad of an opportunity of entring with them.” How this happened is illustrated by the case of a sailor named Samuel Fletcher, who “was always Grumbling when order’d to any Duty, and several times wished to God Almighty they might meet the Pyrates.” Pirate captain Edward England’s crew took nine vessels off the coast of Africa in the spring of 1719 and found 55 of the 143 seamen ready to sign their articles. Such desertion to piracy was common, especially between 1716 and 1722.22

  The seizure of a merchant ship was followed by a moment of confrontational drama. The pirate quartermaster, who had led the boarding party, assembled and asked the seamen of the captured vessel who among them would serve under the death’s head and black colors, and frequently, as suggested by the commentators above, several stepped forward to join up. But some men, as it happened, wanted to volunteer without actually volunteering—in other words
, they wanted to go with the pirates, but at the same time they wanted to pretend that they were forced so that they would have an alibi should they ever be captured. When Bartholomew Roberts gathered together the crew of the prize vessel Onslow in 1721 and “asked who was willing to go, and who not, for he would force nobody,” he found that many of the men “had a Petitioning Countenance,” which caused him to cry, no doubt with a wry smile, “I must oblidge these Fellows with a Shew of fforce.” Men like Peter Scudamore said he “wou’d go with all his Heart with these Pyrates if he cou’d avoid Signing their Articles.” When William Phillips joined a pirate crew, he expressed his hope that someone “wou’d put him in the News Paper.” If anyone did, it was to no avail, as Phillips was captured and hanged at Cape Coast Castle in 1722.23

  Pirates always preferred volunteers, vigorous and enthusiastic ones at that, who would create social cohesion within the group, stronger self-defense, and ultimately greater success in plundering on the high seas. Sam Bellamy’s crew “forced no Body to go with them, and said they would take no Body against their Wills.” A witness testified in court that “it was the Custome among the Pyrates to force no prisoners, but those that remained with them were Voluntiers.” One sailor reported that when Francis Spriggs asked him if he wanted to join the pirates and was refused, he “bid me to go to the Devil, for he would force no man.” Several captains thus “did not press any body (nor indeed is it credible they would).” Yet there were instances when skilled workers were detained. One man was held “because he was a Carpenter and a Singleman,” for his talents were essential to those who lived in a wooden world. This policy against forcing men, however, began to change in the early 1720s. As the number of seamen willing to join dwindled, pirates increasingly coerced crew members of captured vessels, seizing labor power by impressment like the Royal Navy’s and likewise engendering deadly resistance. During the last couple of years of piracy, “forced men” led dramatic mutinies of their own against pirate captains such as John Phillips, who was beheaded in 1724, and William Fly, who was captured and subsequently hanged in Boston in 1726.24