How old were those who became pirates? The ages of 169 pirates who were active between 1716 and 1726 are known. The range was 14 to 50 years, the mean being 28.2 and the median 27; the 20–24 and the 25–29 age categories had the highest concentrations, with 57 and 39 men respectively. Almost three in five pirates were therefore in their twenties. Compared with merchant seamen more broadly in the first half of the seventeenth century, there were fewer teenagers and more men in their thirties among the pirates, but not many. The age distribution among the outlaws was similar to that of the larger community of labor, suggesting that piracy held roughly equal attraction for sailors of all ages.25
It is important to emphasize that a sailor or pirate in his late twenties was not, by the standards of his occupation, a young man. His was a dangerous job, as suggested earlier, with a high risk of death by disease, accident, or military action. A seafaring man of this age was already a man of the world—experienced, knowledgeable, and cosmopolitan. Almost all pirates had been working in a seafaring occupation, probably for several years, before making the decision “to go upon the account.”
Although evidence is sketchy, most pirates seem not to have been bound to land and home by familial ties or obligations. Samuel Cole, the thirty-seven-year-old quartermaster on the Fames’ Revenge with William Fly, left a wife and seven children when he was executed in 1726, but he was an exception. Wives and children were rarely mentioned in the records of trials of pirates, and pirate vessels, to forestall desertion, often would “take no Married Man.” This was true of Edward Low and several other pirate leaders, who sought, as Kennedy explained, to provide “especially against quarrels which might happen among themselves.” A few pirates used their families to plead for mercy when facing the gallows, but the infrequency of the bid supports the conclusion that most were not married.26
Finally, but not least important, pirates almost without exception came from the lowest social classes. Like the larger body of seafaring men of which they were a part, they were poor and had worked in the most proletarian of occupations. They were, as a royal official condescendingly observed, “desperate Rogues” who could have little hope in life ashore. Philip Roche, a sailor who led a mutiny and turned pirate in 1721, was “brought up to a seafaring life,” as were numerous poor, often orphaned boys. Many of those who sailed in pirate ships were men of “no property.”27
Indeed, the number of pirates in this generation who could be considered propertied was exceptionally small by any standard. Among them were two “gentlemen”—Stede Bonnet, who was considered by many to be insane, and Christopher Moody, whose “gentleman-like” demeanor caused his crew to remove him from his command. Two other captains, Edward England and Henry Jennings, were said to be educated, and the same would have been true of the handful of surgeons who sailed with the pirates. A few skilled workers—mates, carpenters, and coopers—who turned pirate might have had modest comforts in life, but the overwhelming majority of pirates were common seamen, men like Walter Kennedy who had much to gain and little to lose by turning pirate.
Where did these pirates come from? What were their geographic origins? The simplest answer is that we do not know. The occupations of these poor seafaring men scattered them to the seven seas, kept them always in motion from one port city to the next, and in the end caused most of them to die young; they left behind little or no property and few documents by their own hands. They were rolling stones who gathered no moss, and because they were always rolling, they are hard to “fix” in geographic terms.
And yet the authorities of the day tried, recording places beside the names of many of the pirates they captured. These places are known for 348 pirates who were active between 1716 and 1726. The problem is, we rarely know the pirate’s actual relationship to the recorded place. Was it a place of birth? A place of ancestral connection? Was it a place where he or she grew up? Or was it rather the home port, the base from which the seafarer always shipped out, a community of family and friends and neighbors? Or was it merely the last port out of which the seaman had sailed, one of an endless series of sailor towns where he had collected his pay and spent it as “the lord of six weeks” before shipping out again? Or was it simply something made up on the spot to mislead the authorities and thereby protect loved ones from the ignominy of impending execution? It is likely that the places with which the authorities associated the pirates were all of these and more. We must therefore, for these reasons and others yet to be explored, treat this evidence with special caution.28
One thing is clear: many, if not most, of the pirates were of British descent (though we must bear in mind that Britishness was a new invention in their day and they probably did not think of themselves in such terms). To be more precise, the majority of the pirates were descended from people who had lived in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Almost half (47.4 percent) were connected specifically to England, and roughly a third of these to Greater London, the vortex of the empire, especially its seafaring neighborhoods, Wapping, Stepney, Shadwell, and Rotherhithe (though most had only London listed rather than a specific neighborhood). About a quarter of the English were linked to other major port cities—Bristol, Liverpool, Plymouth. The rest were attached to counties: Devonshire, Kent, Somersetshire, and Cornwall, sometimes with a provincial port such as Bideford or Falmouth designated, but more commonly without. Roughly one pirate in ten (9.8 percent) was in some manner Irish; one in fourteen (6.3 percent) was Scottish; and one in twenty-five (4.0 percent) was Welsh. Not surprisingly, they, too, often came from the ports: Dublin, Cork, Aberdeen, and Glasgow. The Welsh numbers are modest, but two of the most popular and successful freebooting captains of this generation, Howell Davis and Bartholomew Roberts, were Welsh.
About one-quarter of the pirates were broadly American—that is, associated with the West Indies or North America. A huge majority of the West Indians were linked to the two historic strongholds of piracy, the Bahama Islands and Jamaica, and a few were connected to smaller islands such as Barbados, Martinique, and Antigua. The North Americans were more widely dispersed, the greatest number coming from Massachusetts (mostly Boston) and a smattering from almost everywhere else, from Rhode Island south to New York, on to South Carolina (probably Charleston), and many places between them. Six Native Americans were also involved.
From this fragmentary evidence about geographic association, we may hazard a second generalization: pirates were for the most part formerly deep-sea sailors, the ones who had taken off from the port cities on long voyages to distant parts of the world. Wherever they got caught, most of them were a long way from home, whatever that may have meant.
The evidence on place speaks to one last issue: that some of the pirates were not English or British and indeed came from numerous parts of the world such as Holland, France, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, and several parts of Africa—Calabar, Sierra Leone, and Whydah. According to the documents produced largely by court scribes and other officials, these international connections represented 6.9 percent of the total, but this proportion is misleading. For some reason, record keepers simply did not pay much attention to the pirates from foreign lands. Fortunately we may correct the misimpression by looking at other evidence, which strongly and more accurately conveys the motley, multinational character of the pirate ship.
Governor Nicholas Lawes of Jamaica echoed the thoughts of royal officials everywhere when he called pirates a “banditti of all nations.” Another Caribbean official agreed: they were composed of “all nations.” Black Sam Bellamy’s crew of 1717 was “a Mix’t Multitude of all Country’s,” including British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Native American, African American, and two dozen Africans who had been liberated from a slave ship. In the same year Captain Candler of HMS Winchelsea wrote to the Admiralty that pirates “are compounded of all Nations.” The main mutineers aboard the George Galley in 1724 were an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, two Scots, two Swedes, and a Dane, all of whom became pirates. Benjami
n Evans’s crew consisted of men of English, French, Irish, Spanish, and African descent. Pirate James Barrow illustrated the reality as he sat after supper “prophanely singing ... Spanish and French Songs out of a Dutch prayer book.” Governments often told pirates that “they have no country,” and pirates agreed, as we saw in chapter 1. A colonial official reported to the Council of Trade and Plantations in 1697 that pirates “acknowledged no countrymen, that they had sold their country and were sure to be hanged if taken, and that they would take no quarter, but do all the mischief they could.” And as a mutineer had muttered in 1699, “it signified nothing what part of the World a man liv’d in, so he Liv’d well.” The mixture of nationalities reflected the global nature of seafaring work.29
Most fully hidden by the legal record keeping is the important place that hundreds of people of African descent found on pirate ships. Colonial officials often refused to give black pirates a trial, preferring to profit by selling them into slavery rather than hanging them, with a few notable exceptions. Several maritime men of color ended up “dancing to the four winds,” like the mulatto who sailed with Black Bart Roberts and was hanged for it in Virginia in 1720. Another “resolute Fellow, a Negroe” named Caesar, stood ready to blow up Blackbeard’s ship in 1718 rather than submit to the Royal Navy; he too was hanged.30
Even though a substantial minority of pirates had worked in the slave trade and had therefore been part of the machinery of enslavement and transportation, and even though pirate ships occasionally captured (and sold) cargo that included slaves, Africans and African Americans both free and enslaved were numerous and active on board pirate vessels. Black crewmen made up part of the pirate vanguard, the most trusted and fearsome men designated to board prospective prizes. The boarding party of the Morning Star had “a Negro Cook doubly arm’d”; more than half of Edward Condent’s boarding party on the Dragon was black.31 In 1724 a “free negro” cook divided provisions equally so that the crew aboard Francis Spriggs’s ship might live “very merrily.” “Negroes and Molattoes” were present on almost every pirate ship, and only rarely did the many merchants and captains who commented on their presence call them slaves. Black pirates sailed with Captains Bellamy, Taylor, Williams, Harris, Winter, Shipton, Lyne, Skyrm, Roberts, Spriggs, Bonnet, Phillips, Baptist, Cooper, and others. In 1718, 60 of Blackbeard’s crew of 100 were black, and Captain William Lewis boasted “40 able Negroe Sailors” among his crew of 80. In 1719 Oliver LaBouche’s ship was “half French, half Negroes.”32 Black pirates were common enough to move one newspaper to report that an all-mulatto band of sea robbers was marauding the Caribbean, eating the hearts of captured white men!33 In London, meanwhile, the most successful theatrical event of the period was prevented from portraying the reality of black pirates, as the Lord Chamberlain refused to license Polly, John Gay’s sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, which had ended with Macheath about to be hanged for highway robbery. In Polly he was transported to the West Indies where he escaped the plantation, turned pirate, and, disguising himself as Morano, “a negro villain,” became the principal leader of a gang of freebooters. Polly Peachum dressed herself as a man seeking her hero and the pirates by saying, “Perhaps I may hear of him among the slaves of the next plantation.”34
Some black pirates were free men, like the experienced “free Negro” seaman from Deptford who in 1721 led “a Mutiney that we had too many Officers, and that the work was too hard, and what not.” Others were escaped slaves. In 1716 the slaves of Antigua had grown “very impudent and insulting,” causing their masters to fear an insurrection. Historian Hugh Rankin writes that a substantial number of the unruly “went off to join those pirates who did not seem too concerned about color differences.”35 They were more concerned with who would make a committed pirate, and of course escaped slaves fitted the bill. Just before the events in Antigua, Virginia’s rulers had worried about the connection between the “Ravage of Pyrates” and “an Insurrection of the Negroes.” Soon after, Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Bennett of Bermuda expressed his worries about the “negro men” who had grown “soe very impudent and insulting of late that we have reason to suspect their riseing.” He was also sure, moreover, that if pirates should attack, the slaves would not defend the island but would join the invaders. The sailors of color captured with the rest of Black Bart’s crew in 1722 grew mutinous over the poor conditions and “thin Commons” they suffered at the hands of the Royal Navy, especially since many of them had lived long in the “pyratical Way.” This meant, to them as to others, more food and greater freedom.36
Such material and cultural contacts were not uncommon. A gang of pirates settled in West Africa in the early 1720s, joining and intermixing with the Kru, who were known for their skill in things maritime (and, when enslaved, for their leadership of revolts in the New World). And, of course, for many years pirates had mixed with the native population of Madagascar, helping to produce “a dark Mulatto Race there.” Cultural exchanges among European and African sailors and pirates were extensive, resulting, for example, in the well-known similarities of form between African songs and sea shanties. In 1743 some seamen were court-martialed for singing a “negro song” in defiance of discipline. Mutineers also engaged in the same rites performed by slaves before a revolt. In 1731 a band of mutineers drank rum and gunpowder, and on another occasion a sailor signaled his rebellious intentions by “Drinking Water out of a Musket barrel.” Piracy clearly did not operate according to the black codes enacted and enforced in Atlantic slave societies. Some slaves and free blacks found freedom aboard the pirate ship, which, apart from the maroon communities, was no easy thing to find in the pirates’ main theater of operations, the Caribbean and the American South. Indeed, pirate ships themselves might be considered multiracial maroon communities, in which rebels used the high seas as others used the mountains and the jungles. The ship of pirate captain Thomas Cocklyn was named the Maroon, and pirates frequently called themselves “marooners.”37
What motivated the motley crew to turn pirate? Why did they risk their necks to sail under the Jolly Roger? The motivations were various. Some were escaping bad situations at home. Captain William Snelgrave wrote of Simon Jones, one of his own seamen who had elected to join the pirates: “His circumstances were bad at home: Moreover, he had a Wife who he could not love; and for these Reasons he had entered with the Pirates, and signed their Articles.” The bold woman pirate Anne Bonny went to sea to escape her father’s stifling ways. Stede Bonnet was a propertied man from a ruling family in Barbados; he was said to be in flight from his wife. Many others were no doubt burdened by debt or being hunted for crime. But these were not the most common motivations.38
Traditional explanations of why people turned to piracy have emphasized greed, and there is certainly truth to this. Many who worked the pirate ship wanted money, which as dispossessed proletarians they desperately needed to live. But the struggle for money is more complex than simple greed, as pirates themselves made clear. Money meant simply getting a living, as pirate Stephen Smith explained in a deferential letter to the governor of Jamaica in 1716. It meant subsistence for poor families as pirates explained to Colonel Bennett of Bermuda in 1718. It meant escaping the brutalities of life at sea “as long as they lived,” as pirates explained to prisoner Joseph Hollett in 1721. They were now “Gentlemen of ffortune.”39
Recent interpretations have concentrated on the social causes of piracy, emphasizing the working conditions on merchant and naval ships.40 This is no recent discovery (although it seems to have been forgotten for two and half centuries). Such causes were known by 1716, when Atlantic piracy erupted on a massive scale. One who knew all of the causes was the anonymous author of the pamphlet Piracy Destroy’d, an “Officer of an East India Company Ship” who had conversed “with several of those that have been concerned in the late Piracies in the East Indies” in the 1690s. He believed that the causes of piracy were the “general depravation of Seamens manners, and their little or no sense of religion,
” but he also relayed the reasons pirates had given, all of which turned on the brutalities of work at sea: impressment, beatings, poor food, and the disabling and deadly effects of these on themselves and their families. Some pirates cited “being drubb’d and beaten unmercifully by their Officers.” “Such as had Sail’d in Merchants Ships,” the officer continued, “complain’d of the barbarity of their Commanders, especially in depriving them of their sustenance, not allowing them half of what was necessary to preserve their Bodies in health, they frequently suffering extream thirst by denying them Water, notwithstanding many Tuns [casks] left when they came into Port.” Admiral Edward Vernon agreed in 1720 that many sailors turned pirate because merchant shipowners did not provide adequate victuals for their crews.41
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