Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker

  Cary watched in dismay as the pirates tore through his cargo like “a parcel of Furies,” taking what they wanted and throwing the rest into the sea, threatening, swearing, cursing, and blaspheming all the while. The pirates were full of “madness and rage.” He later heard them declare that “they would not go to Hope point in the River of Thames to be hung up in Gibbets a Sundrying as Kidd and Bradish’s Company did, for if it should chance that they should be Attacked by any Superiour power or force, which they could not master, they would immediately put fire with one of their Pistols to their Powder, and all go merrily to Hell together!” Here they demonstrated their sense of humor, their knowledge of history, and their apocalyptic impulse. “Hope point” was their facetious term for Execution Dock in Wapping on the Thames, where for centuries pirates had been hanged or drowned. Pirates William Kidd and Joseph Bradish had been hanged there in 1701, their corpses enclosed in metal cages and suspended in public as a warning to others. Roberts and his crew vowed to blow themselves up rather than give the British state the satisfaction—and the terroristic propaganda value—of executing them.1

  Hawkins went through “the utmost Confusion and Anxiety of Mind” during and after his capture by Spriggs and company. The pirates boarded his vessel and took what they wanted; “every Thing that pleased them not they threw over-board.” Later, the pirates ate, drank, grew merry, and, seeking “Diversion, for Mischief is their sole Delight,” decided to create for themselves a late-night fireworks show. They set Hawkins’s ship aflame, and “in less than three Quarters of an Hour she was all of a Blaze, and down she went.” He added, “They have no Thoughts of ever being taken; but swear, with the most direful Imprecations, that if ever they should find themselves over-power’d, they would immediately blow their Ship up, rather than do Jolly Roger the disgrace to be struck, or suffer themselves to be hang’d like Dogs.” Like the crew of Roberts, they swore to control their own fate, even if it proved to be a fatal one.2

  Such declarations were by no means unusual among pirates between 1716 and 1726. Indeed, many crews pledged to each other that “They would blow up rather than be taken.” Two pirates transformed the vow into a personal ritual of friendship and devotion: they “took their Pistols, and laid them down by them, and solemnly swore to each other, and pledg’d the Oath in a Bumper of Liquor, that if they saw that there was at last no possibility of Escaping, but that they should be taken, they would set Foot to Foot, and Shoot one another, to Escape Justice and the Halter.” John Gow and his fellow pirates also vowed to blow up—“as they had lived so they would die together.” Captain Charles Harris and his crew “always kept a Barrel of Powder ready to blow up the Sloop rather than be taken.” A favorite toast of Black Bart Roberts among these ever-toasting, ever-drinking sea robbers was “Damnation to him who ever lived to wear a halter.” Coming as they did from a maritime culture suffused with death, and facing the gallows for their choice to break the maritime law of property, pirates defiantly embraced the destructive element.3

  These were no idle boasts. Some of the members of Roberts’s crew meant exactly what they said to Samuel Cary, and indeed they would soon prove it. When they met up with the Swallow, as described in the previous chapter, a hot engagement ensued. True to his toast, Roberts did not live to be hanged. Staying on the main deck with his men during battle, he was killed when grapeshot “struck him directly in the Throat.” His comrades immediately honored a long-standing request: they threw his corpse, still armed, overboard. But once the commander was gone, their ship shattered, “all Hopes fled,” and the cause lost, half a dozen pirates tried to make good on their collective promise to “put fire with one of their Pistols to their Powder, and all go merrily to Hell together!” They gathered around the gunpowder in the magazine in the steerage, into which John Morris fired an incendiary shot. As it happened, the long engagement had depleted the powder, which was now “too small a Quantity to effect any Thing more than burning them in a frightful Manner.” Unable to ignite the apocalyptic explosion they had hoped for, Morris nonetheless managed to kill himself and two of his comrades. Meanwhile, on Roberts’s consort ship, the Ranger, a similar drama was unfolding. James Phillips walked (a little drunkenly, it was said) “with a lighted match” toward the magazine, “swearing very profanely lets all go to Hell together.” He and several others who wanted to carry out the common oath got into a skirmish with mates who found that the once-popular idea had suddenly lost some of its appeal and were prevented from lighting the gunpowder.4

  Numerous other pirate crews of this generation also attempted to blow themselves up, and at least one of them succeeded. As Blackbeard and his fellow pirates began to lose their bloody, hand-to-hand battle with Lieutenant Robert Maynard and his naval force off the coast of North Carolina at the end of November 1718, a black pirate named Caesar, “a resolute fellow,” tried to blow up the ship but was prevented “by two Prisoners that were then in the Hold of the Sloop.” When the pirate ship commanded by Charles Harris was taken by Captain Philip Solgard and H.M.S. Greyhound in late 1723, one freebooter made his way toward the keg of powder to ignite the long-promised blast; “being hindered,” Captain Solgard reported, “he went forward, and with his Pistol shot out his own Brains.” Another group of pirates, captained by Joseph Cooper and sailing in the West Indies in early 1726, had lost a battle with a ship of the Royal Navy. When the officers of the victorious vessel tried to board, Cooper and his mates blew up their ship, killing themselves.5

  The death wish of pirates applied not only to moments of capture, as Captain William Snelgrave discovered, to his horror, while a prisoner aboard Thomas Cocklyn’s vessel, the Rising Sun, in April 1719. A nameless pirate one day asked, said Snelgrave, “Whether I was afraid of going to the Devil by a great Shot.” Snelgrave hardly knew what to say. He could only listen as the pirate declared his own hope—that “he should be sent to Hell one of these days by a Cannon Ball.” Snelgrave replied weakly, “I hoped that would not be my Road.” But not long after, when a fire broke out on the pirate ship, he thought his own road was before him. He, like everyone else on board, knew that the ship had thousands of pounds of gunpowder in its magazine. Soon he heard “a loud shout upon the Main-deck.” The “old harden’d Rogues” among the crew, some of them drunk, had gathered near the fire and begun to huzzah: “For a brave blast to go to Hell with.” This chant they “repeated several times,” much to the terror of Snelgrave and the “new entered Pirates” who were frantically trying to put out the blaze. The pirates were cheering, lustily and repeatedly, for their own mutual destruction.6

  It was a destruction designed to carry them to a specific destination. In announcing that they were on their way to hell, pirates affirmed what respectable, God-fearing people never tired of saying about them—that they were devils, all bound for hell. The captive Philip Ashton, for example, called Ned Low’s crew “Devils Incarnate” who “gave you the Liveliest Picture of Hell.” Judges and ministers routinely proclaimed that pirates had been “instigated by the devil.” By agreeing, pirates inverted the values of Christianity and in various ways cast themselves as something their larger society understood to be evil. Here too they displayed an edgy sense of humor.

  The maritime outlaws embraced Lucifer, the most rebellious of angels. Blackbeard, for example, consciously cultivated an image of himself as Satan, tying up his long black hair and beard in pigtails and inserting sparklers around his face to create an eerie, fiery glow when capturing prize vessels. When William Bell happened upon the tall, intimidating pirate on the Carolina coast and asked who he was and whence he came, Blackbeard replied that “he came from Hell and he would carry him [there] presently.” William Fly taunted Puritan prelates Cotton Mather and Benjamin Colman by “wishing all the devils of hell would come and fly away with the Ship” in which he was captured. Another pirate explained to Snelgrave as he threw a captain’s books overboard that such things bred mischief and might “prevent some of their Comrades from going on in thei
r Voyage to Hell, whither they were all bound.” Captain John Phillips spied a prospective prize and remarked to a bystander that he “want’d the damn’d thing just long enough to sail to Hell in.”7

  Figure 12. Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard; Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers, &c. (London, 1734).

  Captain Charles Johnson illuminated this mentality when he described a conversation between two pirates chained together in captivity on their way to being hanged. When one of them took to praying, the older pirate of the two, Thomas Sutton, swore at the younger man and asked him “what he proposed by so much Noise and Devotion.” “Heaven, says the other, I hope.” Sutton was aghast. “Heaven, you Fool, says Sutton, did you ever hear of any Pyrates going thither?” No, he said, “Give me H–ll, it’s a merrier Place: I’ll give Roberts a salute of 13 Guns at Entrance.” When it became clear that his words had no effect, Sutton requested that the guard “either remove this Man, or take his Prayer-Book away, as a common Disturber.”8 Some pirates turned the religious world, like the social world, upside down. Hell was a merrier place than heaven, and pirates loved merriment.

  In this chapter we listen to these cries from the dead zone, using them to explore the interrelated themes of death, apocalypse, hell, and self-destruction—fundamental matters of life and death and what they might have meant to these poor, motley, seafaring people in the early eighteenth century. Piracy in the early eighteenth century was, at bottom, a struggle for life against socially organized death. The contradictory, ironic, and humorous embrace of death by the pirates seems a good point of entry.

  Pirates themselves made the point about the omnipresence of death, and made it repeatedly, in court, in petitions, and in mutinous action. A man from Aberdeen named William Scott, a member of Stede Bonnet’s crew, gave a simple, quiet self-defense in his 1718 trial for piracy in Charleston, South Carolina: “What I did, was to keep me from perishing.” When pirate Stephen Smith wrote a letter to a royal official requesting a pardon for his piracies, he explained, I am “now forced to go a pirateing to gett a living, which is much against my will.” Finding himself aboard a death ship and contemplating mutiny and piracy in 1719, seaman Robert Sparks explained to his fellow tars that “they had better be dead than live in misery.” William Mething agreed, adding, “Damn it, it was better to be hanged than [to] live so.” In 1721, after organizing a successful mutiny aboard a Royal African Company ship, George Lowther spoke for all of the sailors: “it was not their Business to starve, or be made Slaves.” Men who had sailed with Edward Condent in the Indian Ocean explained that they “had got enough & don their Busyness, & that they need not go to sea again as long as they lived.” For many, piracy was an effort to escape the death trap, a desperate although contradictory choice for life.9

  They found—and made—much life, if only for a short while, as we have seen. Once sailors got, as Walter Kennedy put it, “the choice in themselves”—that is, the autonomous power to organize the ship and its miniature society as they wanted—they built a better world than the one they had found on the merchant, naval, and privateering ships of the early modern Atlantic. They transformed harsh discipline into a looser, more libertarian way of running their ship that depended on “what Punishment the Captain and Majority of the Company shall think fit.” They transformed the realities of chronically meager rations into riotous chronic feasting, an exploitative wage relation into a collective risk bearing, and injury and premature death into active health care and security. Their democratic selection of officers stood in stark, telling contrast to the near-dictatorial arrangement of command in the merchant service and Royal Navy. Building on the lower-class/lower-deck values of collectivism, anti-authoritarianism, and egalitarianism, the pirates realized, through their social order, tendencies that had been dialectically generated and in turn suppressed in the normal course of alienated work and life at sea. These signs of life flowered in the black shadow of death, for if the dangers of the common seaman’s life were extreme, those surrounding the pirate, in battle, in prison, or on the gallows, loomed even larger. They looked this grim reality in the eye and laughed.

  A gang of pirates, five thousand miles from London, sat amid the red mangrove trees on a deserted island off the southwestern coast of Cuba, musing about life, death, justice, and the English legal system. The year was 1722. Pirates with Captain Thomas Anstis had retired to the island to live what they called “a marooning life.” They hoped to be pardoned by King George II for their piracies, which were many, and indeed they had written a petition to him for that purpose. Now they would lie low while awaiting an answer by way of a Jamaica merchant, in the meantime subsisting on turtle and diverting themselves as best they could. They did what sailors usually did to pass the long, tedious hours at sea: they danced, they sang, they told tales, and they performed plays.10

  One of their favorite dramas was a “Mock Court of Judicature to try one another for Pyracy.” They created a dramatis personae and allocated the roles. One pirate was selected to be the judge to hear the case, another the attorney general to prosecute, others to be court officials and staff, yet others to make up the jury, and several, finally, to be the accused. They improvised with costumes, props, and sets. Lacking a black robe, the judge “had a dirty Tarpulin hung over his Shoulders.” Lacking a wig, he stuck a thrum cap on his head. He put “a large Pair of Spectacles on his Nose” and took his exalted place up in a tree so as to look down on the proceedings from a position above it all. Scurrying around below were “an abundance of Officers attending him,” comically using ship’s tools, “Crows, Handspikes, &c. instead of Wands, Tipstaves, and such like.” Soon “the Criminals were brought out,” probably in chains, “making a thousand sour Faces” as they entered the outdoor courtroom. The attorney general “opened the Charges against them.” His speech, like all of the others in the play, was “very laconick,” and the entire proceeding “concise.” They apparently performed the play numerous times, changing the roles so that “he that was a Criminal one Day was made Judge another.”11

  Figure 13. The mock trial performed by the crew of Thomas Anstis; Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (London, 1724).

  News of the play eventually made its way from the Caribbean to London, to Captain Charles Johnson, who would include it in A General History of the Pyrates, the first volume of which was published in 1724. He wrote, “I had an Account given me of one of these merry Tryals, and as it appeared diverting, I shall give the Readers a short Account of it.” It is not known whether the account “given” to Johnson was written or oral, though it was most likely relayed as a detailed story by a member of Anstis’s crew who had been on the island, escaped subsequent shipwreck and capture, and returned secretly to England in October 1723. Johnson admitted knowing two members of the crew, whom, he explained, “I forbear to name, because, I understand they are at this day employed in an honest Vocation” in London. Johnson, who is widely regarded as a reliable chronicler, insisted on the authenticity of the play: “This is the Tryal just as it was related to me; the Design of my setting it down, is only to shew how these Fellows can jest upon things, the Fear and Dread of which, should make them tremble.” This is precisely what makes the play so valuable for our purposes: it shows the pirate’s ability to laugh in the face of his own death.

  The play begins, and the courtroom comes to order.

  ATTORN. GEN. An’t please your Lordship, and you gentlemen of the Jury, here is a Fellow before you that is a sad Dog, a sad sad Dog; and I humbly hope your Lordship will order him to be hang’d out of the Way immediately —He has committed Pyracy on the High seas, and we shall prove, an’t please your Lordship, that this Fellow, this sad Dog before you, has escap’d a thousand Storms, nay, has got safe ashore when the Ship has been cast away, which was a certain sign he was not born to be drown’d; yet not having the Fear of Ha
nging before his Eyes, he went on robbing and ravishing Man, Woman, and Child, plundering Ships’ Cargoes fore and aft, burning and sinking Ship, Bark, and Boat, as if the Devil had been in him. But this is not all, my Lord, he has committed worse Villainies than all these, for we shall prove, that he has been guilty of drinking Small-Beer, and your Lordship knows, there never was sober fellow but what was a Rogue.—My Lord, I should have spoke much finer than I do now, but that as your Lordship knows our Rum is all out, and how should a man speak good Law that has not drank a Dram —However, I hope, your Lordship will order the Fellow to be hang’d.

  JUDGE.—Hearkee me, Sirrah,—you lousy, pittiful, ill-look’d Dog; what have you to say why you should not be tuck’d up immediately, and set a Sun-drying like a Scare-crow?—Are you guilty, or not guilty?

  PRIS. Not guilty, an’t please your Worship.

  JUDGE. Not guilty! Say so again, Sirrah, and I’ll have you hang’d without any Tryal.

  PRIS. An’t please your Worship’s Honour, my Lord, I am as honest a poor Fellow as ever went between Stem and Stern of a Ship, and can hand, reef, and steer, and clap two Ends of a Rope together, as well as e’er a He that ever cross’d salt Water; but I was taken by one George Bradley [the name of him that sat as Judge] a notorious Pyrate, a sad Rogue as ever was unhang’d, and he forced me, an’t please your Honour.

  JUDGE. Answer me, Sirrah, —How will you be tried?

  PRIS. By G– and my Country.